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HP Pondering Sale of WebOS
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters reports HP is seeking to sell WebOS, at the bidding of its financial advisers. Sounds like open sourcing it is off the table. From the article: 'HP is trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, viewed by many analysts and investors as an expensive foray into the smartphone market that has not paid off. Several technology companies have expressed an interest in buying the division, which is seen as attractive for its patents, the sources said. Amazon.com Inc, Research In Motion, IBM, Oracle Corp and Intel Corp are considered to be among the companies likely to be interested in the asset, industry sources said.'"
Shouldn't HP figure out what the hell it will be good at? Clearly they are having a problem with corporate vision and future goals.
I hope IBM buys WebOS, open sources it, and sparks a new generation of personal devices!
Sell it to RIM!
Trolling is a art,
I can't see what Amazon would do with it. They're heavily invested in Android now with their existing devices and Android App Store.
Talk about a disaster. Again.
Where's it going to stop? Oracle hiring Linus? :)
Amazon is already heavily customizing Android to the point where they are kind of diverging from the mainstream - they may as well go further and add in some WebOS ideas into the system. I think it could be a great match. They would have the most unique Android tablet by far, which they are already a good ways along with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I personally have found webOS to be the best one. I think webOS has suffered because of poor hardware not because there is anything wrong with the OS. Bought a touchpad during the firesale and really enjoy using it, only complaint is the obvious lack of apps.
I'd assume they would be interested in the Palm patents.
If they blend the best of Maemo, Meego, Tizen, Symbian and WebOS, all laced with Qt, they could get an ecosystem. Too bad is located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where only strange creatures lives in. They still have a chance before Microsoft curse finish to kill them.
I have a Pre and Touchpad, because of webOS. My Pre died pre-maturely *yup, thanks* and I replaced it, with a Pre. I've had the old Windows Mobile, Palm OS, proprietary systems, Android, and iOS. Palm/HP hardware sucks, but the OS is the sweetest ever. Intuitive, smooth multitasking, just gorgeous. To lose it would be a shame, especially if the alternative is iOS. Inelegant by comparison. Yes I know, a gillion apps. Same for Android.
At this point, exactly how many developers or software engineers does HP have left in its WebOS department? Probably not many. If they sell it now, it'll basically be just a pile of source code, not an intact team that's experienced with it and can do something with it. This is something these stupid corporations never seem to understand: that the real value is not just in some product, but having an engineering team behind it that has years of experience developing it, and knows how to use it and modify it for customer needs. It's not easy putting together a competent team from scratch, and even if you do manage to get good people, it takes a long time for them to come up to speed, especially if there's no other experts around they can talk to.
"Several technology companies have expressed an interest in buying the division, which is seen as attractive for its patents."
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this.
I think the answer you are looking for is there in the summary. They would want the patents. Maybe some things in android could be improved with those patents?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
The current HP CEO has been in her job for weeks. It'd make more sense to wait and see what the next one thinks.
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"Sounds like open sourcing it is off the table."
It's like Deja vu all over again.
Go Meg, Go!
Ah gotcha, I'm sure you're right... if even just as defensive patents.
Well sure, buying a company for its smartphone and then never actually releasing a phone with those assets is an expensive foray with little payout. Maybe if they'd actually put out a product before the Pre enthusiasts drifted off to other platforms, they'd have done better. I was very disappointed when I had to give up my Pre because I realized the Pre 3 was nowhere on the horizon.
This is starting to get old - hp is doing this, now they're not, then again, but wait, but no.
C'mon, make a decision!
And Linux fails once again!
Somewhere, there's a rule that the further up the corporate ladder you climb, the bigger of a nimrod you have to be.
Seriously, did they really think Palm wasn't going to fail? What on earth were they thinking? Has Palm ever done an OS correctly? EVER? Lets see, their competitors were Apple, which has been lauded as the most user friendly in every type of OS they've ever produced... Google, who doesn't seem to be able to write anything that geeks don't love... and Microsoft... ok, maybe they could steal all 25 of Microsoft's mobile customers. Good Business decision HP... oh wait, I forgot, HP makes all their money off of printer ink.
IBM is emphatically NOT an end-user-focused company. They explicitly fled away from that market years ago. What on earth would they do with WebOS that couldn't be done easier and cheaper with some other OS?
Thank you... exactly what I wanted to write.
You left out the part where merill lynch will earn a % for handling the merger. It's like asking a car salesman if he thinks I should keep my current car or buy a new car from his lot.
It's a little funny asking Merrill Lynch -- a company that failed and was forced to sell to BoA -- for financial advice.
IBM will buy it for sure. After rebrand, it will be called... wait for it... WebOS/2!
IBM will support WebOS on zEnterprise via its zWX component.
IBM generally sells business solutions and technology - the latter sometimes as patent licenses, sometimes developing products and selling them off. For example, the popular "swiping" method of keyboard entry on smartphones came from ""ShapeWriter" (previously SHARK), an IBM product they sold to another company to commercialise.
I'm sure there are a lot of assets in WebOS that could be developed. For example, what if you go a step beyond Apple's Siri, and integrate a smartphone interface with the deep AI of IBM's Watson Jeopardy champion (currently being commercialised for optimising medical treatment in the health insurance industry)? Sell or license that product to application developers for everything from intelligent tourist guides to on site first aid agents, who sell their wares on Android, iTunes, Blackberry or Microsoft app stores.
Lots of possibilities for a firm with cutting edge research and development. Like HP used to be, once.
I'd buy it in a second. WebOS is, by far, the single best mobile OS around right now. It is more advanced than either Android or iOS and has all kinds of promise if it is backed by a company that isn't just dabbling in it. It's a travesty that so far it has had the bad luck of being offered by a company on it's way out (Palm) and then a company that seemed to see it as a funny oddity (HP).
I've heard that both of the people who use WebOS are very happy. Keep it alive!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I would love to run HP and do a 'second coming Steve Jobs' on it.
Jonathanjk.com
I've always thought that WebOS was great, it just needs a little fine tuning and a little ecosystem of services to support it. Why not bring in a few really talented, creative people who can refine the user experience and help develop the platform a bit, then get it in the hands of people at a fair price point. It's really one of the better operating systems out there, and the fact that they have it and don't know what to do with it implies terrible things for HP.
In the same vein why would RIM want WebOS when they already have QNX? Or Amazon with the Kindle's OS / Android already developed.
Oracle doesn't have much to do with tablets and already have Solaris. And I don't see why Intel would want an OS and if they did being designed for a tablet using their competitor's Quallcomm uprocessors on it, might not especially help.
Really, if this is the list of potential buyers... they probably don't have a good chance for selling it. Sorry guys, but hopefully you've updated your resumes recently...
If some random company buys webOS *without* Palm's IP/patents, they would be sued the second they actually used it in a product. These days, if you don't have a decent patent warchest, it doesn't matter how good your product or software is... webOS is a useless asset without the patents, either Palm's or already owning a similar rich set already.
For those that realize this, the list of possible buyers now becomes much, much smaller...
It might look like conspiracy theory but this is what I'm thinking now. HP shareholders (and "financial advisors") also hold shares of Apple, Microsoft and God knows who else. Maybe they demanded WebOS to be burned regardless of costs ? Keeping Apple Wonder Bubble (TM) afloat is much more profitable after all. Keeping a bunch of artificially created monopolies instead of highly competitive market with lower margins is much more profitable for that 1% that owns 35% of whole economy. They can demand from corporation A to crash & burn something in order to boost profits for corporation B, they-re also invested in.
> The HP board are not visionaries, technologist, or engineers.
Well, HP had an engineer as a CEO. And although he made far fewer mistakes than the CEO before him, he didn't really do all that well either.
and none of that needs webos.
they can hack linux and sdl together themself.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The people who have actually used it, myself included find the UI very good indeed.
Nobody is suing about it.
For a tablet/smartphone manufacturer, having a superior UI backed with lawsuit-proof code is the way out of the legal clusterfuck involving Apple, Google, and even Micro$oft . . . which appear to have collectively concluded that since they can't compete on superior technology, that their road to future growth is to sue its competing OSs out of existence.
Personally, I hope Apple and Google and Microsoft succeed in blowing each other out of the mobile market.
Tech Public Policy stuff
haven't palm diluted them by already selling an os out twice?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
IBM might be in for the patent.
On the other hand, as they are more open-source friendly, and don't really need a phone/tablet GUI right now, maybe they'll open-source the closed source part of the code.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Agreed fully. If finance is the source of innovation then HP are doomed, and by extension, so are Bank of America & Merrill Lynch.
Now what HP should be doing is taking their Web-OS tablet and ensure that their full range of corporate applications are streamlined to work on the WebOS. In actual fact, i'd take that WebOS tablet and streamline it in almost every manner specifically to be the preferred enterprise application tablet as opposed to a consumer tablet.
Exactly what the above means.... corporate remote manageability, good development environment, fantastic barcode and scanner device integration, extra durable, extended battery life, great out of the box adapters for their corporate applications, etc.
With their focus on HTML5 apps we have started entering into the trusted computing phase of life.
I already trust my iPad more for online banking than my Windows 7 PC. Why - its obvious, the ipad doesnt have viruses and can therefore be considered secure.
Trusted computing has soo many advantages to society yet in the hands of the wolves it has many disadvantages too.
-Tim
An all-hands-on-deck meeting just to hear Meg Whitman recite her version of Hamlet's soliliquiy? Leo Apotheker must be cackling loudly while counting his golden parachute lucre.
However, this sordid affair does prove there is no afterlife, as evidenced by the fact neither Hewlett nor Packard have come back to strangle everyone at HP HQ that's wearing a suit.
Looking to the future: Is there a company? an application? a technical requirement? etc. that uniquely requires WebOS? The only value would be patents. Why would HPQ sell those asset?
I believe the bank and/or Merrill Lynch also stand to reap a commission ($ millions) if HP actually does execute a sale of WebOS. I know, it's insane, but NYT ran a recent story that several HP acquisitions were completed under advice from teams like this that also participated in the sale/transfer and got huge commissions for that turnover.
Another argument against the efficiency of private business.
Why would HP sell WebOS? We are clearly moving to thin devices so it would seem WebOS is a key asset to lever.
I would ideally want WebOS to go open source. It seems that's not going to happen. What about selling it to RIM? They have decent hardware ( the PlayBook comes to mind) - with webOS they'll have decent software as well. They should stop spending time on the Android emulator. ( As BB tablet owner how would you feel running ( sometimes crappy ) Android software on an emulator? ) Their current generation of phones are (theoretically ) capable of running WebOS as is the Playbook. Dear RIM, please pay and buy WebOS. You are not paying for a good OS. You're paying to have a future in the market.
Ah, HP...the company where great products go to die.