Oh, HP TouchPad and HP Pre 3, we hardly knew you! Over night, HP announced that it’s killing off its webOS devices and plans to spin-off its PC division as a seperate entity while the bulk of HP turns towards enterprise software with the acquisition of British firm Autonomy.
While the devices are dead, This Is My Next reports that webOS boss Stephen DeWitt repeatedly told employees: “We are not walking away from webOS.” But though HP is making all the right noises about licensing or selling webOS, who might pick up the baton? Can webOS really live on?
One of the biggest issues with getting webOS picked up by another manufacturer is that it currently only works with Qualcomm chips. Any company planning to pick up the OS is likely to want to see a version of webOS that’s ready to play with a wider selection of hardware.
HP’s initial dream with webOS was to put it into a wide range of devices including printers and PCs but that never came to pass. Perhaps another company might run with that dream and turn webOS into the underlying architecture for a new generation of connected consumer electronics. It’s probably best not to hold out too much hope of that dream coming true though.
The number of big name candidates out there who might be tempted to licence webOS looks pretty slim too. Nokia is too tied up with Windows Phone to consider webOS. HTC and LG already have Android and Windows Phone to work with while Samsung has both of those and its own bada OS to play with.
Meanwhile RIM is still ploughing on with BlackBerry OS 7 and planning the transition to QNX smartphones. For BlackBerry, the death of webOS is most likely a welcome bit of good news, one less also-ran to tussle with for the market share left in the wake of iPhone and Android.
There are smaller wild card options like ZTE or Vizio who might be tempted to grab a piece of webOS for the right price, using it to jazz up affordable tablets and smartphones, but the problem is that without a significant volume of sales, developers just aren’t going to be drawn to the platform.
Without a stream of new apps, webOS’s deck of cards is going to look ever weaker. HP says it isn’t walking away from webOS but by killing its devices before licensing the software to another player, its made it look very unappealing.
Rather than seeing webOS licensed as a living entity, it’s far more likely that it’ll be picked apart in the ongoing patent wars. Now Google has grabbed itself a big stash of mobile patents by buying Motorola, it’s not hard to envisage a scenario with Microsoft, Apple and Google go sniffing around the Palm patents to further enlarge their arsenals.
Being picked apart by patent vultures would be a sad way to see webOS bow out but it seems a lot more likely than some white knight riding in to bring compelling devices to the market. HP didn’t give webOS the time or attention it needed to succeed and it’s hard to see who else might.
