Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.