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Amazon In Talks With HP To Buy Palm
Nemilar writes with this excerpt from VentureBeat:
"Who will save what's left of Palm from HP's bumbling? It could be Amazon, as the online retailing giant is in serious negotiations to snap up Palm from HP. No other company seems as fitting a home for Palm and its webOS software. It's worth noting that former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, who now holds a vague 'product innovation' role at HP's Personal Services Group, joined Amazon's board late last year."
A good 20% of the staff in Amazon's Kindle division (Lab126) are ex-Palm. They can rejoin their old coworkers.
Except I am told that many of the people left Palm because they didn't like working with some people there. And some people from Palm were glad that some of these people left because they were real assholes.
Ok I read TFA and I'm not sure how this is going to work out.
Amazon has an Android tablet but so heavily disguised you supposedly can't tell it's Android, and there is apparently some kind of appeal in adopting WebOS which they could also heavily disguise to look similar, although it probably won't be compatible with Fire first edition apps. What TFA doesn't say is what this does to the Fire early adopters. Nothing good, I suspect.
I was interested in the Fire, especially at that price point, but am now going to hold off and see how this plays out, which I recognize is the Osborne Effect revisited, but as much as I like Palm, and as much as I was attracted to the Fire, as a responsible consumer I can't buy every damned thing that comes out and then re-buy it when the *real* product succeeds it. The advantage is that Amazon isn't betting the farm on the Fire, so they can probably handle reduced sales while they work out their strategic direction.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Consider that by buying WebOS they now have claim to the landslide of Touchpads that just sold AND all the positive marketing. Negotiate in a deal for upgrading the software for them, and you have one hell of an advertizing base...instantly. Not to mention owning all the patents as well.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Three thoughts.
#1 is obvious - patents. Perhaps they expect Apple to sue them trying to block sales, or MS to come collecting fees, and think that Palm has a patent portfolio that is a good deterrent in mobile tech (which wouldn't be surprising).
#2 is that Amazon sees patent problems with Android, especially the ones with Oracle, and thinks that there is a good chance that this will translate to considerable $$$ payouts for anyone who's building their systems on that (since, obviously, Oracle will sue all Android manufacturers for licensing fees if they win the fight with Google). And so they want a safe fallback platform, preferably one that is already stable and proven, yet not completely different (still Linux at heart).
#3 is that Android that runs on Kindle Fire is very different from your typical Android. To a casual user, it's pretty much unrecognizable. To that extent, one wonders if they could take webOS and slap an Android compat layer on top of that (given that it's also Linux-based, it's probably not all that hard to make Dalvik run there). Not sure what would possibly be gained by doing that, but from what I heard, webOS is better at smooth UI than Android.
you are the idiot. Amazon wants a tablet locked in to their content. webOS provides much better lock-in than a neutered vesion of Android that's sure to be hacked and forced open sooner or later. Amazon is probably the only player aside from Apple/Google/MS to be in a position to create and support an ecosystem.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I bet the corporate culture at Amazon is better than it is at Palm at the moment, so a merger might be liberating for the employees. This is also great for competition; Android might get some benefits, but I'm looking forward to see how they will leverage their mindshare with their tablet business. It's nice to see another big name giving Apple a run for their money.
I think Google would have bought them a good while ago if they really wanted them. In fact, I think that they probably considered them before buying out Motorola Mobility and decided on the latter because of their (much) stronger patent portfolio.
The card interface is nice because it works on the given form factor better than any of the other implementations. Generally, in iOS and Android, you don't know what other applications are currently running. And a taskbar is almost always too small to use easily on a touch device, sure you could make it bigger but then its either taking up extremely valuable real estate or it needs to have a gesture or button to activate. Personally, I don't see it as much different that alt-tabbing through open windows in any desktop OS, though I grant that it would be nice to have two or more applications visible and intractable at the same time.
Take the money. Hopefully a lot but anything. Just take it. After a decade of bad mergers at least HP can shed itself of Palm. Maybe it will pay for the Meg Whitman exit package.
The N810's implementation of Maemo used a taskbar (on the left of the screen), and it worked just fine.
the guy who wrote the article is an idiot.
you are the idiot.
yes lets throw millions of dollars to recreate the wheel cuz web os fanboys are our target market. idiot.
NERD RAGE, NERD FIGHT!!!! Somebody call Jerry Springer. Move out midgets and hookers, nerds are in da house!