
It’s Official: HP Kills Off webOS Phones and the TouchPad - canistr
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/its-official-hp-kills-off-webos-phones-and-the-touchpad/
======
donw
Once again, HP proves that the collective vision of Bill Hewlett and Dave
Packard is so long-dead that the tombstone has crumbled to dust.

I'm gutted. Genuinely.

When I was younger, before Fiorina stepped up to be the first to rape the
corpses of the founders, I was a massive fan of HP. My first graphing
calculator was an HP48G, which taught me the joys of Lisp... well, Psil,
because it came with Reverse Polish Lisp.

WebOS could have been the resurrection of that culture -- fully JavaScript
development environment, app development across multiple mobile and tablet
platforms with a single environment... just genius. It's sad to see that
vision evaporate, along with some of the novel telephony and interactive
features that made WebOS a joy to work with.

~~~
paul9290
Time for Nintendo to buy WebOS and start up their iPhone competitor devices.
Such could be a real serious competitor to Apple and Nintendo is losing market
share.

They know how to do hardware and know how to market hand held IP devices. Why
shouldn't they jump head first and give Apple/Android significant competition?

~~~
chaostheory
Nintendo is the closest company to Apple. It would be interesting to see what
they do if both 3DS and Wii U fail. Who knows maybe it is time for them to do
another major transition like they did around the 70s.

~~~
Steko
Standing predictions:

(1) Wii U will be a huge bust for holiday 2012 leading to...

(2) a huge bidding war a couple quarters later for Nintendo as an exclusive
3rd party.

(3) Microsoft will win, overpaying heavily.

(4) Shigeru Miyamoto's swan songs of Mario and Zelda with Kinect will be Co-
Games of the Year 2013 but...

(5) less than a year later Nintendo will opt out of the Microsoft deal and
produce for everyone.

~~~
ansy
Nintendo will have to have a string of spectacular failures before it starts
share cropping. Remember n64? Remember GameCube? Both were pretty lackluster
compared to Super NES. VirtualBoy? Disaster.

The Wii U and 3DS might be disappointing, but Nintendo is a survivor. It has
the internal support to last through dry spells on the strength of first party
titles alone.

It would be very difficult for a company as resilient and conservative as
Nintendo to sink itself in such a short time frame. Remember, too, this
company also started off making playing cards 100 years ago.

The only bad end I could see in Nintendo's immediate future would be an
aggressive if not hostile takeover. I believe its market cap is only $20
billion, and supposedly half of that is in cash. If Apple or Microsoft wanted
to pay a premium for the ultimate maker of killer apps this is the time to
make a move. In another cycle it will be too late: the mobile wars will be
decided and/or Nintendo will likely have recovered. Who knows how well the
company would survive a takeover though.

~~~
philwelch
I think the Wii, in retrospect, is the writing on the wall for Nintendo's
hardware. They couldn't keep up on graphics or CPU, so they went sideways into
new controller technologies. The problem with that, as demonstrated by Kinect,
is that it's easier to add a new controller technology to an existing console
than it is to improve the horsepower of a weak console with a novel controller
scheme.

~~~
ansy
I disagree pretty strongly. All of the major game consoles are an IBM PowerPC
CPU with nVidia/ATI graphics. Everything is off the shelf. The Xbox 360,
GameCube, Wii, and Playstation 3 are pretty much all based on those same
designs (although the PS3's CPU has crazy after-market modifications which
really didn't work out so well).

The same can be said about phones and portable video game systems. It's all
ARM CPUs with Imagine GPUs. Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, webOS,
Nintendo GBA/DS/3DS, Sony Vita all use the exact same chips from the same
design firms.

The big hardware differentiator is what cost/performance balance you want to
strike. Newer architectures with newer manufacturing processes cost more plain
and simple. And there is a spectrum of other off the shelf components to round
out the package.

There can be some play in getting more out of a design with engineering tricks
or getting better components at the same cost with economies of scale. Or you
can corner the market by buying out the entire manufacturing capacity of the
best components to deny your competitors (or vice versa). But it's pretty much
you get what you pay for.

Nintendo builds hardware two to three generations behind to save a lot on
costs. Not because it doesn't know how to get something faster and better. The
upcoming Wii U is basically an older PowerPC CPU with an older ATI GPU. If
Nintendo wanted, it could create a crazy powerful console with a $1000 CPU and
dual $600 GPUs that nobody would buy. All it needed to do was tell IBM and ATI
what it wanted. It wasn't a matter of engineering that steered them away, but
a matter of economics. Which if you remember right worked great in the short
term for the Wii. But as everyone already knew wasn't a long term play. Hence
the earlier-than-everyone-else release of the Wii U.

~~~
wisty
It also ignores what Nintendo _is_. Nintendo is vertically integrated. It
makes game machines, games, and game characters (i.e. Mario). It doesn't make
money by making a better FPS machine. It makes money by making a cheap machine
with some wacky creative edge (i.e. a new type of controller). Then its game
division creates the best games, with their internal know-how. Then they
leverage the Mario brand, and sell they can sell the whole package (along with
the sequels they crank out) with a massive margin.

If it flops, who cares? They didn't spend huge amounts on loss-leading
hardware, and they didn't need to make a huge investment in a cutting edge FPS
only to be told it's not as good as Halo.

Apple (along with the Angry Birds developers) stole their lunch, with another
cheap game machine, with an even _cooler_ new control system. Eventually, that
market will start to mature, and you will need 100 developers to make a good
iOS game. And Nintendo won't want to touch that market with a barge pole,
because it becomes a winner-takes-all bloodbath with huge entry costs.

The question is, is iOS an existential threat to the gaming market as a whole?
If so, Nintendo will lose. If not, Nintendo will come up with some other wacky
control system, and build a few fun (but simple) games staring Mario. People
will buy it, because they want a bit of a change from their familiar, mature,
and eventually boring touch games. Apple won't hurt them this cycle, because
they are busy consolidating their monopoly on tables. Apple doesn't want to
take over the gaming market - the 3DS was just a piece of collateral damage.
Apple _wants_ to sell a boring mature platform (with simple updates to
performance, but no fundamental changes), not novelties that will need to be
redesigned every 5 years. But the iPad just happens to be new enough to still
be a novelty, and thus devastate Nintendo.

------
martingordon
HP spent $1.2B to acquire Palm a little over a year ago. According to Google
Patents, Palm is the assignee in 12,000 patents. If HP can sell off the Palm
patents for the same $/patent as Google is paying in their Motorola
acquisition, they would net $8.8B.

It's a sad day for innovation when patents are worth more than the product
they back. Why wouldn't HP kill off webOS? How long would it have taken them
to make $7B in profits off of webOS?

~~~
recoiledsnake
I think we are quickly approaching a point of patent detente. Google needs to
get a few more patents and indemnify Android OEMs and maybe lob a few lawsuits
at Bing etc. and MS will quickly cross license. Same against Apple.

~~~
sleight42
Detente? Between the big contenders, perhaps. The up and comers are still very
much at risk.

~~~
olefoo
And one sign of a "mature market" is that barriers to entry rise. So for the
big players the game of patent poker is the price they pay to keep the
innovations down to a dull roar and to "manage the competitive environment",
for actual innovators It just means that the slope is steeper, and if they are
at all successful they will attract predators like Lodsys/IV.

And while a few more entrepreneurs getting ground into hamburger by lawyers
isn't that big of a concern in the larger scheme of things; it does mean that
innovation in the tech sector is tamed and that we lose out on great products
that never get a chance to compete in the marketplace.

~~~
sleight42
Mature? It's artificially stymied and partially stagnated by the external
imposition of ignorantly granted government monopolies.

------
andrewljohnson
Glad we told them we weren't interested in developing apps when they contacted
us on April 15. I eventually had a phone call with the fellow who emailed us,
and I explained to him HP was doomed. He told me they were sure they could be
a strong third!

Here was the original email:

 _Hello,

I am part of Hewlett-Packard’s Business Development team that focuses on
engaging one-on-one in strategic relationships with leading partners for webOS
app opportunities.

I wanted to touch base with you to see how things were going with your "APP
NAME REDACTED", and also discuss with you our plans for HP’s upcoming webOS
tablet launch.

If you have some time, it would be great to connect to share where we are
headed, and also hear more about your mobile strategy.

Let me know when you’d be available and I can schedule a call- I hope to speak
with you soon._

~~~
rsanchez1
At least they reached out to you. I kept trying and trying to reach someone at
HP regarding an issue with an app I was working on for a company I assume they
would have wanted on board, but to this day, TO THIS DAY, I got nowhere with
HP.

------
bradly
HP sent me a TouchPad a couple weeks ago and after the first 2 days I haven't
touched it. It just didn't seem like a finished product. I got errors and
buggy UI interactions regularly. It lacked mature apps for basic usage like
reading ebooks. Also, the screen rotation sensor is really sensitive so it
almost always needs to have the orientation locked.

A couple things I did like about the TouchPad over the iPad: shift key on the
keyboard to access special chars easier and downloading apps without being
thrown out of the App Store.

~~~
canistr
To be fair, WebOS released version 3.2 which was apparently suppose to fix a
lot of bugs that were there at launch in 3.0.

~~~
raganwald
“I went out for dinner with someone new, but my date was late to pick me up,
the car was uncomfortable, the place I was taken had terrible service, and I
had the runs after eating the food there.”

“Yeah, but your date has learned a lot from taking people on dates like that
and most of that stuff has been fixed. How about another date?”

Not making fun of your factually correct statement, obviously, just pointing
out that in many cases you do not get a second chance to make a first
impression.

~~~
canistr
I disagree. Consider people's first impressions of the iPhone when the iPhone
2G launched, or of Android when the G1 launched, or how almost every
Blackberry device has launched with buggy firmware requiring users to update
the OS only a couple of weeks after launch.

You're picking and choosing a specific example when, if you recall everyone
else, it was pretty much the same thing. Buggy software was the sole reason
why the TouchPad or even WebOS failed.

~~~
ssmoot
I don't know anyone personally who thought the original iPhone was anything
less than The Jesus Phone.

~~~
xp84
I feel like the prevailing sentiment in 2007 was that most everything Apple
chose to include in the iPhone, they executed well. It wasn't all that buggy
at launch. However, there was a lot of very valid criticism of it--mostly that
it had many glaring omissions -- 3G, copy/paste, ability to turn off
autocomplete so you can type in other languages, etc.

This has gone on to be the core of the Apple mobile strategy--they don't worry
about being first to market with every feature, rather the biggest concern is
not to ship buggy/unreliable stuff that doesn't deliver on its promises. If at
all possible.

~~~
angusgr
This is also the major disadvantage for anyone new coming into this space.

Apple got to launch their incomplete-but-solid product and then spend a year
or two refining it and incrementally adding features. That's the advantage of
redefining/creating the market you launch in though, it doesn't extend to
anyone else.

For anyone trying to compete with them now, they have to hit the ground
running with a comparable-or-better feature set (which I assume is why Android
vendors make so much fuss about Flash) _and_ comparable polish.

------
RexRollman
It is amazing to me that of everyone who has made tablets, only Apple seems to
be successful at it. Maybe it is just like someone said recently: there is no
tablet market; just an iPad market.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Actually, Android Tablets have already taken 20% of the market:

[http://www.abiresearch.com/press/3753-Android+Takes+20%25+Me...](http://www.abiresearch.com/press/3753-Android+Takes+20%25+Media+Tablet+Market+Share+from+iPad+in+Last+12+Months)

Android-based Phones were slower to get that much market-share, and we all
know how that turned out. It's really just a matter of time.

~~~
A-K
"It's really just a matter of time."

Is it though? Shipments don't equal sales.

<http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance>

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Sure, you can put blinders on and ignore the last 3 years of identical
arguments being tossed around, and the results of those 3 years of sales.

------
spitfire
Wow. That was incompetent. Talk about ignoring your OODA loop. Who is the new
guy running HP these days?

Had HP been smart they would have stayed in the tablet business and
aggressively integrated it with their software stack. Letting customers buy HP
from end to end, sort of like Apple.

They've just handed Apple a much easier path into the enterprise market -
which they don't seem to be wasting.

~~~
mrich
Apotheker is the CEO, and he strikes me as the wrong CEO for this company.
This decision is bad, and I am not surprised it is being made during his
tenure. He is a guy who is good with cost savings, but lacks in vision.

~~~
mbesto
He's awful. He got quietly shuffled out of SAP after 18 months as CEO. If
you're trying to innovate in a technology company, he's definitely not the
person to do so.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who works for SAP and
apparently he has a very established network of large enterprise companies who
would buy his ERP software if he told them to buy it. This is how enterprise
software works by the way - its not by value but by the shake of a hand. The
question is what software do they have to sell? Sure they bought Autonomy, but
that's only a small piece of the pie.

~~~
diogenescynic
Because the person buying the software isn't the person using the software.

~~~
chintan
This one line sums up all the issues of the Enterprise and Health care
information technology and everything that is broken about it.

Startupreneurs who are looking to white-label to enterprise, STOP. dont waste
your time.

~~~
rikthevik
I'm developing software for a health organization in Canada, and you should
see the reactions I get from users when they realize that I listened to their
concerns and tailored the software to them. I feel like Santa at Christmas.

------
drgath
I'm astonished that they aren't even going to bother selling it off. With the
Google/Motorola merger, surely one of the Android partners has to be feeling a
little uncomfortable right now. Hell, Motorola was always rumored to be
working on its own JS-based OS because it didn't like the position of relying
only on Android.

~~~
bradleyland
As a whole, I don't see much value. Why would anyone be interested in
purchasing a failed-to-launch tablet product when Android tablets sell well
and the software is free (outside of patent deals with trolls)? The
distinction of having your own software didn't work for HP, so why should it
work for Samsung/HTC/etc?

However! I think the big sale is yet to come. When HP bought Palm, they
acquired their 1,600-ish patents as well. Palm was a very early player in the
smartphone market, so it's conceivable that this portfolio contains some
attractive property. Having paid $1.2 billion for Palm, either selling this
patent portfolio outright, or taking the Lodsys route seems plausible. Given
the heat around patent acquisition right now, they'd probably do pretty well;
maybe even exceeding their original purchase price.

~~~
blinkingled
Yes. Palm patents have the potential of creating another Nortel type
situation. That is possibly a part of "optimization of webOS revenue". Would
be interesting to see who gets a hold of this pile.

~~~
drgath
HP already has a hold of this pile. I wouldn't just assume that because
they're exiting the hardware business they have no (future) need for that
portfolio. Heck, if anything, they'll have to hold on to those if they hope to
license webOS to other handset makers (the latest rumor).

~~~
blinkingled
It is hard to imagine why they will sit on the Palm portfolio without hardware
business considering their new focus is to become IBM/SAP like - enterprisey.
IBM for e.g. sold 1000 patents to Google short while ago.

And besides, I am not certain webOS licensing is going to go very far. We will
see..

------
ConstantineXVI
The TouchPad launched on 7/1 in the US; 48 days ago. By a strange coincidence,
that's how long it took for the Kin to be cancelled as well.

~~~
recoiledsnake
Kin brought some decent tech to the scene but was heavily hampered by Verizon
requiring a full cost data plan for a phone that was aimed at teens. Also was
an abject failure of the Danger acquisition by Microsoft, so lets see how
Google/Motorola does.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Danger was a bit of a different scenario; the Sidekicks[1] and Kin were
actually made by Sharp and Motorola, and Microsoft dumped Danger's OS for a
WinCE derivative (not to mention the rumblings of being kneecapped by the WP7
team and such). Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android
exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and
Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.

[1] Or Hiptops, depending on if you're in Magenta territory or not

~~~
recoiledsnake
I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after
it shipped? I am with you on the kneecapping from the WP team though.

>Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively,
already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google
doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.

That's a really hard tightrope walk for Google. The last one to try this model
of both making hardware and licensing the OS was Apple during the nineties and
we all know how that ended.

They need to make money from Motorola (currently it's at breakeven) to justify
the purchase price for shareholders, but without pissing off the other OEMs
like Samsung/HTC. I am not saying it can't be done, but it's very very hard.

~~~
macrael
Switching to a winCE based OS delayed the release by at least a year, which
definitely hurt their chances in the market. Not to mention that it probably
made whatever internal pressures from phone 7 much worse as well, since the
phone 7 project was not nearly as far along when kin might have originally
shipped. Huge, classic Microsoft mistake to rewrite the OS based on windows
tech.

~~~
xp84
Yeah, seems like ego got in the way of doing what's best for the product.
Microsoft just couldn't live with themselves if they ever shipped a product
that wasn't entirely "Invented Here."

------
ww520
Is perseverance a passé in business these days? Everything has to be instant
success? What happen to build the product slowly over time?

~~~
anigbrowl
It's like Cisco and the Flip, isn't it - pure market plays, zero technical
vision or willingness to go over the market'snhead to consumers. That said, HP
never had a compelling vision for the mass market anyway.

------
jabo
Only yesterday I received this email from a HP.com email address.

"Hello,

I am in business development with the HP Touchpad group and we are recruiting
apps to be ported to our Touchpad Platform. I saw your app on the chrome store
and wanted to reach out to gauge the interest. Since the Touchpad supports
both Flash and HTML5, our technical team believes that porting your Scribble
and Pixza Lite apps to our platform should be fairly easy. We have support
resources, MDF, marketing programs, and loaner devices to assist the effort. I
would be happy to do a quick call to explain things further.

Thanks," xxxxxx

------
jemeshsu
HP should open source webOS.

~~~
reemrevnivek
Agreed! Android is Linux + Java, Chumby is Linux + Flash, webOS is Linux +
Webkit ( and iOS is...different). Definitely prefer the webOS option, and
there aren't that many other permutations.

Unlike the other options, webOS is composed of two open source projects. What
prevents someone from knitting them together, with a little hardware
interfacing? Would it be legally problematic to attempt to make an OS that was
compatible with the existing webOS apps?

~~~
nextparadigms
Well Java was supposed to be open source, too, until Oracle sh!t on it, that
is.

------
revorad
"Since I'd been very young HP had been the highlight company for engineers" -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMRmG72LBU8>

I wonder what Woz thinks now. It must be a sad day for many HP engineers.

~~~
Splines
What sort of stuff are they doing now? In the consumer's eye, they make
mediocre printers and PCs.

In my university days I happily used a HP calculator and scope, in addition to
HPUX. Are those businesses still going strong?

~~~
sciurus
Who makes better printers? I've always been a fan of HP due to their work on
HPLIP.

~~~
Splines
Perhaps I was unfair - that's just my perspective of the current state of
affairs. I've used some HP printers and some non-HP printers in the last few
years, and the HP ones did nothing to stand out of the pack.

I guess what I mean to say is that HP just seems like yet-another consumer
electronics company. It isn't apparent to me if people have brand-loyalty to
HP in the consumer segment.

------
ansy
It appears this kills any chance of another manufacturer picking up webOS. If
HP can't make it work why should anyone else try?

Hindsight is 20/20. Google and Palm could have made a deal. At least then the
WebOS team could merge with the ChromeOS team. And Google would have that
patent trove for a bargain price. And an in-house manufacturer, too, if that's
what it wanted.

Too late for that now. At best Google will get the patents at a significant
premium. ChromeOS is too far along to benefit from WebOS. And now Google has
Motorola, what would it do with Palm's hardware?

------
anigbrowl
I didn't expect my prediction to come true quite _that_ fast: _RIM and HP are
the big losers here; I can't see any reason to buy into the Blackberry OS or
WebOS from either a consumer or business point of view._
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879195>)

------
blinkingled
<http://live.thisismynext.com/Event/HP_Q3_2011_earnings_call>

Height of vague cluelessness in the non-answers. Scary given the impact of the
announcements.

"all outcomes are possible, including a potential non-transaction" [about the
PC business spin off ] - Why announce anything right now then?

"How will you make webOS profitable? A> We expect the dev expenses to come
down dramatically -- down to 1 or 2 cents per share a quarter. If you look at
the run rate losses there, you can attribute them pretty much to Palm" -- i.e.
we will make it profitable by killing it!

------
steveb
Apple's path of disruption continues. I hope they open source WebOS, but they
will probably sell it for the patents based on what MMI got from Google.

I wish Nokia would have bought Palm.

Expect the PC market to be disrupted next by Apple with Macbook Airs sucking
up all the profits, and iOS devices crimping unit growth. Who is going to
stick their neck out to make single-digit margins on a Windows 8 tablet?

~~~
pedalpete
I agree the Macbook Air is an incredibly compelling hardware product placing
the low-end mac in the same market as the high-end pc laptop.

However, in the mid-to-low end, your average Windows machine is still
significantly cheaper than a similarly equiped Mac. Expect PCs to still own
the low-priced market.

I'm not sure where you get your 'single-digit margins' comment from, but what
are the real options for hardware manufacturers? You can't make a product
without an OS, and your options are Android and Windows. I for one prefer a
Windows device (WP over Android anyway). There is a market.

~~~
steveb
HP gets about 5-6% operating margin on PCs: HP personal systems group:
[http://h30261.www3.hp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=71087&p=irol-n...](http://h30261.www3.hp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=71087&p=irol-
newsArticle&ID=1598003&highlight=) Personal Systems Group (PSG) revenue
declined 3% year over year with a 5.9% operating margin.

Dell had $2.9 billion in consumer sales, $ 73 million profit:
[http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/fiscal12q2_relea...](http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/fiscal12q2_release.aspx)

Meanwhile, PC sales are declining in the U.S. and Europe. So it's a
slow/negative growth market with small profits.

Virtually all of the (non-Apple) profit in the PC market accumulates to
Microsoft and Intel. Windows costs around $50, that means that even if they
could make a tablet as cheaply as Apple, they would still make significantly
less profit.

And there is no evidence at all that anyone can compete with the iPad right
now.

------
voyou
They're also selling off their PC division, and buying Autonomy
(<http://www.autonomy.com/>), who produce search and data-mining type
software. I assume this is an attempt to re-focus on enterprise back-end
stuff; this is a pretty big part of their business already, so I can see how
this move might make sense.

------
thought_alarm
I wonder what they're going to do with the hundreds of thousands of unsold
units. Bury them next to the pile Atari E.T. cartridges, I suppose.

~~~
ChuckMcM
They could do something exceptionally creative, they could sell them at half-
cost with full schematics and data sheets for all of the parts. Plus
documentation on the boot process, identify jtag/test ports, maybe boot rom
source code.

This would save them from an expensive e-recycling bill.

It would put a lot of now 'open' tablets on the market which would give a huge
cadre of people who would give it a shot a chance to do something amazing. It
could change the world.

Its a shame that winning the lottery is more likely than this outcome.

~~~
ChuckMcM
In an interesting test of Google+ I shared an open letter to HP with this
suggestion to 'Public.' Since I don't think anyone from HP follows me it
probably won't get anywhere but if you see it and reshare it, perhaps it could
increase the odds.

~~~
mmastrac
Do you have a link to your Google+ post?

------
nQuo
I feel that one of the main problems with webOS is that many people like it a
lot for the design and want to see its potential unleashed.

Yet users don't vote for webOS with their wallets and developers don't make
webOS apps, because many question whether it can be a sustainable mobile
platform. Another reason is that the hardware running webOS has always been a
bit of a let-down.

On a side note, I can't help but wonder if Steve Jobs feels a little saddened
to see HP's lack of vision and commitment nowadays to make great products.
Yes, HP's obviously a major competitor but mostly in the PC industry where it
makes much slimmer margins. Jobs' first summer job was at Hewlett-Packard and
also where he met Steve Wozniak, so it's more of a personal sting to witness
the once iconic company giving up on post-PC devices.

------
p0ppe
Ari Jaaksi, HP's SVP in charge of webOS and services had an interesting tweet
40 minutes ago;

"We will continue webOS platform full speed! #webOS"

~~~
xp84
#goingdownwiththeship?

------
A-K
Tragic. It makes me wonder: Now what is Jon Rubinstein's future at HP?

~~~
vbone
Doesn't matter. He led the destruction of what could have been a great
product.

~~~
canistr
I guess the writing was on the wall when their UI designer left for Google.

------
shaggyfrog
So does Microsoft come a-calling with a bag with a giant $ on it, and suggest
coming back to Windows? Does Google dangle Android?

Or does this mean HP is getting out of mobile altogether? If so, that's a huge
mistake, given the state of the market right now. Especially if they are
spinning off the PC side of things, what's left for HP? Printers?

~~~
forgotAgain
Apotheker wants to make HP the next SAP. I guess he misses being there.

~~~
mbesto
Which is amazing considering the time it would take to create a brand new
piece of software. Unless of course they buy one... SalesForce, Infor maybe?

------
teyc
HP couldn't solve the chicken vs egg problem. An upstart OS from an
established company is still an upstart OS. With MS launching their Windows
tablet in the near future, HP will have to run very hard to establish their
positions before the MS onslaught.

The journey to iPad started with iPods and iTunes, then iPod touch apps, then
iPhone and finally iPad. Steve's brilliant insight is that a music device with
a computer is a computer, and outflanked the music industry and Microsoft in
one fell swoop.

Even today, MS still can't ship a music store on the PC.

PS What Google did right was to give away the OS early on, and that allowed
the Shenzhen manufacturers to produce the iPeds that swamped the low end
markets. I don't know if this is going to work out in the long run, but
installed bases is important if you want a developer ecosystem.

------
jp
I think the PRE2 is a great device. Google Apps email, SMS texting and Google
Maps is fantastic. Browser works great. The clever status light, the window
swiping, the bottom gesture panel logic and the clever window bundling makes
Android and Bada feel completely retarded. Very good over the air software
updater. Pointing that out since Bada is very dumb in that department and
requires a huge iTunes like application. The HP CEO is either retarded or
scared.

Like... I got an HP laptop and an HP phone... and suddenly this is not cool
enough for HP because of some premature, rushed to marked, tablets ?

Disclosure: I have received a few developer phones over the years.

------
mathoda
If you're an HP engineer working on webOS, given the commitment level your
execs have to that platform, why wouldn't you jump ship? Startups, Apple,
Google, Facebook, even Microsoft, may benefit in terms of human talent.

------
dgregd
One thing I do not understand. These HP and others CEOs earn millions monthly.
So they are not stupid.

How many desktop _platforms_ survived? Two. Windows and MacOS by miracle.

So why they think that the world needs more than 2 or 3 mobile _platforms_?
Why they think is it possible to beat Microsoft / Nokia / RIM / Samsung with
already collapsed company? Why they bought Palm? What was the thinking?

Or maybe they are personally making money with acquisition like this. Similar
to CEOs from banking when they led whole financial sector to the cliff.

~~~
SwellJoe
This logic could have been applied to Android. There were numerous "leading"
mobile operating systems when Android launched. Likewise for Apple launching
the iPhone and iOS.

Sometimes, a company has to bet they can beat the competition, or we get stuck
with the same old crap, forever.

~~~
wallflower
Dug up this vintage article on the all-in bet that was the iPhone

<http://counternotions.com/2008/07/16/bet-iphone/>

------
Luyt
esr writes in his latest Smartphone Wars[1] installment:

"WebOS, we hardly knew ye [...] WebOS has looked terminal to us for a long
time. [...] WebOS didn’t suck, technically speaking. It was certainly better
constructed than the turd-with-frosting that is WP7. [...] The cool thing
about WebOS was that its architecture was beautiful. [...] WebOS’s problem was
that the coolness stopped there. The source was closed, with all the usual bad
effects including higher defect rates and lower developer interest. [...] Some
sort of larger shakeout seems to be going on. [...] RIM is next to the wall,
probably. WP7 should already have been terminated for extreme failure
(Samsung’s own-brand Bada OS is actually outselling it[2]) [...] It might be
that Android, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM are now entering scorpions-in-a-bottle
time. [...] There can be only one... major incumbent. A whale, with a minnow
or two in its shadow. Maybe Android should invert the Twitter fail whale into
a success cetacean?"

[1] <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3611>

[2] [http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Samsungs-Bada-
outs...](http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Samsungs-Bada-outsells-
Windows-Phone-in-Q2/1313075608)

------
azth
From <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14584428>

"HP is recognising what the world has recognised, which is hardware in terms
of consumers is not a huge growth business anymore," said Michael Yoshikami,
chief executive of YCMNET Advisors.

"It's not where the money is. It's in keeping with the new CEO's perspective
that they want to be more in services and more business-oriented."

~~~
hollerith
Makes sense when you consider how little consumers pay for new computers (and
quasi-computer things like tablets) compared to 10 or 20 years ago.

------
dman
This is karma coming back to bite Palm for doing nothing with the BeOS rights.

------
emehrkay
I still want someone to couple webOS with great hardware and dev tools.

~~~
recoiledsnake
Hardware seems to have be panned but are the dev tools bad?

~~~
knotty66
The dev tools are good.

------
taylorbuley
HP just created itself the perfect reason to open source WebOS and throw a
disruption cocktail at Google and Apple

~~~
floppydisk
I'd love to see a true "open source" mobile operating system make an
appearance. However, I don't think HP has a track record of magnanimity when
it comes to open sourcing expensive acquisitions IP.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
No corp is going to open source their proprietary technology when they stand
to make money from selling it. There won't be an open source mobile OS, the
best we can hope for are OSes with browser shells (Boot 2 Gecko) and html5 as
the platform.

~~~
xp84
> when they stand to make money from selling it.

Really? Seriously? Who would buy WebOS today? I'm all ears. I'm sure HP is
too. Not only has it failed to gain a foothold under two separate companies,
there is no successful licensed (more than $0 cost) mobile OS on the market
today. You have two vertically integrated (AAPL and RIMM), and one free one
(Android). Windows Phone is not as much of a failure as WebOS, but that
doesn't exactly make the job easier for WebOS's next owner. It just means they
have to fight even to be #3.

Come to think of it, open sourcing the whole thing could be a good move. It's
the Netscape strategy all over again. It wouldn't really make HP any money,
though, so they won't.

~~~
AppSec
I have a hard time with the WebOS failed to get a foothold under two separate
companies.

HP never really tried. $1.2B and then trashing it so quickly? That's not
trying.

This was a perfect opportunity to take the time and do it right. A company
that was/is good with hardware, now has a great mobile OS. It had some time to
take the loss financially with success of other areas (laptops, enterprise
software, etc).

------
Apocryphon
And then there were 2 and a half.

~~~
lukifer
Blackberry counts as a half? Seems high.

~~~
Apocryphon
I was thinking of Windows Phone 7. Maybe WinPho 7 + Blackberry is half.

------
soapdog
wtf?!?!?!? HP Pre 3 just launched on Palm Europe??? this makes no sense

~~~
j_col
Speaking as someone who ordered one within Europe as soon as it was released
directly from Europe, I'm frankly disgusted by this news and disgusted with
the execs at HP. Will never buy one of their products again.

~~~
ja2ke
They're solving that by no longer releasing products.

~~~
j_col
Printers? Software?

~~~
ja2ke
True. Sorry for my lame, sarcastic hyperbole.

------
saturdaysaint
I wonder if WebOS will be attractive to any of the handset makers that harbor
suspicions about Google/Motorolla - HTC? Samsung (call it Bada 2.0?)? Sony?

-

It strikes me that Apple could make a lot of money by making cheaper (sub
$1,000) MacBooks now that the competition is running scared. If they could
sell a 2010 white Macbook for $900 (which I presume would still have a
respectable margin), you wouldn't see a PC on a college campus and they'd even
make a compelling case for a bigger enterprise push..

~~~
xp84
> wonder if WebOS will be attractive to any of the handset makers

As much as I hate Android and am friendly toward WebOS, and would like to see
it make inroads, there's still the problem to solve of getting third party
developers. Asking all the companies that make the apps that sell devices to
develop for more than one or two dissimilar platforms is very hard. Sure, you
can get a few, like Facebook and the others who have WebOS apps already, or
you can count on an enthusiastic developer base to write grassroots
replacement apps when the "big guys" snub your small platform. But you're not
going to sell John Q Public with "We have dozens of apps and more are added
every month!" Now, though you can't SELL them when you have few apps, you CAN
bribe, and that's how Android clawed its way out of last place and into the
lead. The only way to get those WebOS phones into enough hands to get
developers to take notice and see it as a must-support platform is to give
away the phones. Free with contract. That's the ONLY way. And this late in the
game, it'd have to be free plus heavy marketing support.

------
rbanffy
Apotheker behaved in a truly managerish way...

~~~
Apocryphon
I can't believe he backpedaled so much. This is backstab territory against the
webOS community.

------
watmough
This is really sad. I would have liked to have seen webOS carve out a decent
niche against Android and iOS, especially seeing that application development
could be largely JavaScript-based with C++ for the high-performance parts.

Commiserations to all the people that worked on webOS.

------
checoivan
I don't think HP is throwing the towel, just not putting all eggs in a single
basket. They know now how big a challenge is to turn it around on the tablet
market. Cloud's the thing now so they're also getting into it.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yeah, they're also selling off their PC division and buying Autonomy (records
management industry leader from the UK) for $10 billion. Overpriced IMHO.

------
nnutter
WebOS was so close to being amazing. I can only hope they pull off something
amazing with HTC or Samsung making the hardware.

On the other hand if Apple makes a 7" tablet I won't even have a major reason
to look elsewhere.

------
westajay
This reminds me of Gerstner's OS/2 move with IBM in the early 90's.

Does anyone have insight into why Palm (pre & post HP) struggled to get the
hardware right and remove glitchy behaviour from the OS?

------
jsz0
Is this a practical example of how Google's strategy with Android is just a
bit anti-competitive? Neither Palm or HP could have seriously considered
licensing WebOS to compete against Android because neither has a gigantic
advertising business to subsidize the cost of development. On the flip side of
that how is Palm or HP going to compete with companies like Samsung, HTC,
Motorola, etc who are getting their OS for free? If they skip the costs to
develop their own OS and go with Android what differentiates an HP tablet from
a Samsung tablet if they're running the same OS? All roads lead back to
Android. You either use it or you can't compete against it.

~~~
fpgeek
Android has its pluses and minuses. It isn't impossible for a platform with
license fees to compete with that (see Nokia and WP7, for example).

If HP can't find a way to package webOS to compete with Android (either
directly or license), that is HP failing in the competition, not Google being
anti-competitive.

------
protomyth
This is one of those times I wish Red Hat (or another Linux company) had the
money to buy WebOS from HP. It would make a very interesting standard UI.

~~~
sciurus
They're developing GNOME 3 at a much lower cost. Not that they seem to have
any interest in the consumer market.

------
hollerith
Does anybody here think that Microsoft will publicly concede defeat in the
smartphone business like HP did today at any time in the next 4 years?

~~~
recoiledsnake
Like they gave up on the XBox while bleeding billions?

------
jamieb
Some companies don't seem to have caught on that we are in a recession. People
don't have the money to just go out and buy the latest cool gadget. No more
one-upping friends. No more trying out the latest toy. In a bygone age HP
Touchwhatsits would be littering Hummer H2 dashboards everywhere. Not so
today.

------
recoiledsnake
Are they going to make Windows 8 tablets?

>HP’s wording up above leaves things a bit vague, with at least two potential
routes left open: licensing webOS to others

Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a
company as big as HP pushing it? Obvious choices for OEMs seem to be Android
or Windows 8.

Sign me up for a $150 Touchpad at the firesale if there is one(resisting
temptation to call it the Ouchpad like a headline did).

That's how much I am willing to spend for the latest OS with no future joining
the ranks of good-but-dead ones like Amiga and BeOS.

~~~
trun
WebOS has always been the most impressive mobile OS IMO, it's just never had a
competent owner or decent hardware to back it up. I hope they do _something_
with it.

This, of course, is coming from one of the suckers that paid $599 for a
Touchpad on launch day, so take it with a grain of salt.

~~~
jessedhillon
Coming from one of the suckers who bought a Palm Pre two years ago and is
still using it (gotta love contracts!), I see nothing redeeming about WebOS.
WebOS was Palm's Potemkin village -- a shallow attempt to convince a larger,
dumber company that they were relevant enough to warrant a buyout, by creating
the appearance of a technically impressive achievement.

Apart from technical merits, of which there are only a few and they are
debatable, one of the values of an operating system _is_ the commitment of the
company behind it -- and with clowns like Palm and HP who stopped issuing
updates only months after launch, I say fuck them and any carrier who allowed
these pieces of shit to pass technical acceptance.

The only reason I've hung onto this thing for 2 years is because I'm
determined to make this the phone that loses Sprint my business.

~~~
rbanffy
I happen to own a Palm Pre 2 and I have a completely different perception.
It's light, small and responsive and the way you use it, the just-type
interface, the cards thing, is very natural.

It's really sad.

~~~
runjake
You should try a more popular mobile OS that hasn't completely failed in the
market, like WP7 ;)

~~~
rbanffy
Not yet, but be patient. It will fail.

------
barista
Inevitable decision. It's really hard to do complete stack unless you are
completely comitted to it like aaple is. It was always going to be an uphill
battle for HP and I am glad they realized this sooner than later. I said this
before. Nokia did a smart thing by adopting a third party software and
leveraging their position in hardware to get a good bargain in return.

