It’s Official: HP Kills Off webOS Phones and the TouchPad

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/its-official-hp-kills-off-webos-phones-and-the-touchpad/

by canistr • 15 years ago

437 305 15 years ago

techcrunch.com

emehrkay3• 15 years ago

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

canistr4• 15 years ago

I do too but it's no good if HP owns all the rights and patents. Not to mention all the developers.

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

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

knotty662• 15 years ago

The dev tools are good.

drgath3• 15 years ago

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.

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

Who would buy it? HTC or Samsung? Nokia? The OEMs are worse at making OSes and dev ecosystems than even HP which has experience making a UNIX based OS. And it's not as if buying WebOS will stop the patent attacks, in fact, it may increase them. They would simply be better off with Android/Windows 8 for tablets

As Nokia's CEO said, it's a battle of ecosystems now, not devices anymore. Maybe RIM's next, either for a takeover, or a failure.

robterrell• 15 years ago

Who would buy it? How about the bidder who lost out, Apple?

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-rim-google-hp-palm-2010...

One year later, I'm sure whatever it was Apple saw in Palm (patents, according to the above article) is still there.

roc2• 15 years ago

More surprising than not selling it: why not just send webOS out with the consumer PC spinoff?

There's probably not a high-margin future for it but surely it would be an asset for a consumer company.

bradleyland2• 15 years ago

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.

blinkingled3• 15 years ago

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.

drgath3• 15 years ago

"Why would anyone be interested in purchasing a failed-to-launch tablet product when Android tablets sell well and the software is free"

a) webOS is an OS that has been shipped on much more than just this latest tablet. It's a fantastic OS, but has been hampered by poor execution by Palm & HP.

b) Android tablets are not selling well.

mikeryan• 15 years ago

Sell what off? They're keeping WebOS (at least for now) not sure what kind of manufacturing Palm does but its likely small and something that HP could continue to use.

I dont' doubt HP is still going to build Tablets and phones they're just likely going to be Android.

A-K3• 15 years ago

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

vbone2• 15 years ago

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

canistr4• 15 years ago

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

jfruh• 15 years ago

I'm guessing none? Probably his future is counting the money he made for himself and Palm shareholders 16 months ago in the buyout.

shaggyfrog2• 15 years ago

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?

jaydz• 15 years ago

HP is moving deeper into the Enterprise business. First with hardware and now with software. Are they trying to clone IBM or SAP?

roc2• 15 years ago

It looks like IBM with a side order of overpriced corporate IT hardware solutions as well. (PCs/Servers/Printers)

forgotAgain2• 15 years ago

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

mbesto2• 15 years ago

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?

orky72• 15 years ago

if they buy autonomy($10 billion) then they are definitely in enterprise solutions.

shaggyfrog2• 15 years ago

Wow, downvoted, really?

jemeshsu• 15 years ago

HP should open source webOS.

RexRollman6• 15 years ago

I agree. I think it could make for a very interesting desktop OS, if done right.

reemrevnivek2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

Such a move from a CEO that just canned the whole thing after paying 1.2B to acquire it?

Not likely.

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

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.

RexRollman6• 15 years ago

I have the feeling that, if they are getting out of the PC business, they're probably getting out of the tablet business as well.

emehrkay3• 15 years ago

If the hardware were $150, someone will figure out how to put honeycomb on it

cpeterso• 15 years ago

Maybe HP can slap Android on the TouchPads they haven't sold? :)

trun• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

zmmmmm3• 15 years ago

> Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it?

Remember the word license here has multiple meanings ... I read it as a coded message to the other players - start getting ready to "license our patents" or get ready to be sued. In the world of patent MAD the only way to sue and not get sued back with patents is not to have any products. And look what HP is doing - basically announcing the spinning of any product that might be a target and then sending a coded message about "licensing" to its competitors. My tin foil hat might be over-sensitive, but reading between the lines this sounds all too close to be true. When you tie the timing in with Googorola - valuing patents at $510k each - you can imagine this might just have pushed them over the edge to a completely different monetization strategy for WebOS.

ConstantineXVI2• 15 years ago

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.

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

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.

ConstantineXVI2• 15 years ago

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

commandar• 15 years ago

VZW originally planned to provide more attractive data plans and provide full marketing support, but Microsoft was so late getting the Kin to market that VZW essentially threw their hands in the air and dropped those plans.

swilliams• 15 years ago

They spent $1.2 billion on Palm, only to kill the whole project after it had been on the market in 48 days?! I had no doubt that HP would bungle that acquisition, but I didn't think they'd do it so spectacularly.

RexRollman6• 15 years ago

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.

scorpioxy2• 15 years ago

I don't think that's right. The Motorola Xoom seems to have done ok, and so did the Samsung tablet.

HP never exerted any effort into its tablet. It released a faulty device just to catch up with the rest of the vendors releasing devices.

I believe that the next wave of Android tablets will be awesome, so the next generation from Motorola and Samsung. HP doesn't seem interested.

olivercameron2• 15 years ago

You mean the same Motorola Xoom that may have sold as few as 25,000[1] units?

1. http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/tablets/22...

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

Asus claims to be selling 400,000 Eee tablets a month. I own one, and when I went to pick up a cover sleeve at Central Computers* lately they said the things are flying off the shelves.

* best walk-in store in SF, btw

bengl3rt• 15 years ago

I love Central Computer! It has the selection of Fry's, but the employees actually speak english and the merchandise is well lit and organized... and for that you do pay quite a premium over Fry's, but it's worth it.

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

>Maybe it is just like someone said recently: there is no tablet market; just an iPad market

We will have more data points on that 'observation' when Windows 8 launches(April, say the rumors).

brk• 15 years ago

We will have more data points on that 'observation' when Windows 8 launches

Sorry, but I just find this statement hard to agree with. Microsoft is forever shipping some "game changer" "pretty soon now", but they haven't managed to change any games in a very long time now.

If Microsoft, or anyone else, has some revolutionary thing, it will be interesting to see it when it happens. But I am certainly not anticipating any such event in the next year.

saturdaysaint2• 15 years ago

HP's exit doesn't exactly speak to the ability of Microsoft software to power compelling consumer devices.

Pewpewarrows2• 15 years ago

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

http://www.abiresearch.com/press/3753-Android+Takes+20%25+Me...

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-K3• 15 years ago

"It's really just a matter of time."

Is it though? Shipments don't equal sales.

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

notatoad• 15 years ago

i just read a good comment on reddit explaining why that number is wrong: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jn2dy/.../c2dgju...

gamble2• 15 years ago

There is no way Android represents 20% of the tablets sold this year. Seriously, I doubt it's 5%.

It's incredible that anyone can make that claim when it's patently obvious from simple observation that there are hardly any Android tablets in the wild. If they're going to pull numbers out of their ass to create the perception that Android is succeeding on tablets, they should at least make up numbers that are marginally plausible.

brudgers3• 15 years ago

Fujitsu has been successfully making tablets for the better part of two decades. http://solutions.us.fujitsu.com/www/content/products/Tablet-...

xp8410• 15 years ago

Yeah yeah, but "Tablet PC" is not the same device as we mean today when we say tablet. And also, I guess by "successfully making tablets" you mean "being the only mfg who bothers with the incredibly tiny niche of Tablet PC buyers consisting of warehouse operations, hospitals, and about 20 really nerdy college students." And even then, much of that niche may in the future go to "real tablets" that run mobile OSs instead of Windows XP/7. For one thing, "real tablets" in the modern sense cost about a third of those huge pen-based Windows things.

younata• 15 years ago

I have a tablet pc. After getting rid of windows, I came to love it.

That said, I would not recommend it to people. The iPad actually can, and does, do the job of a tablet pc far better than any tablet pc I've used.

pyre• 15 years ago

The same was said when the iPhone launched.

edit: Care to explain the down votes? It's too early to make such proclamations. It took a while for the cellphone market to catch up with Apple, why should we expect the tablet market to be any different?

ralfd2• 15 years ago

True, but the tablet market is in one important aspect different from the phone market, in that the distribution channels are vastly different. Many who buy a new phone just take what the carriers are shoving in their sales channel.

In the best case scenario the iPad could play out more like the iPod: year after year there were prominent iPod-killers like the Zune and cheap knockoffs and year after year Apple dominated the market.

Game_Ender• 15 years ago

iPhone didn't immediately command a large percentage of the market, the iPad does. This is much closer to the iPod situation where many companies tried to match it but failed.

jsz02• 15 years ago

For one thing it was Apple's exclusivity with AT&T that opened the door for Verizon to push Android which played a vital role in its success. Things are a bit different with the iPad being that it's offered in both CDMA and GSM and the wifi-only model is, by far, the most popular.

It's also important to note there's really only one successful competitor to the iPhone -- Android. WebOS is dead, RIM is on the ropes, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc didn't catch up as much as they let Google catch-up and they rode their success. (my point being we can't under estimate the difficulty in trying to compete toe-to-toe with iOS as only one company has done it successfully to date)

Legion3• 15 years ago

I don't think that's the case, but there definitely isn't a market for tablets that fail to compete on features or price.

The brilliance of what Apple has done with their mobile products is hard to overstate. They put all this effort into designing mobile chips and a mobile OS for the iPhone and iPod Touch. They took the fruits of those efforts and stuck them into a tablet format, and bam, you've got an iPad. They took them and stuck them into a set-top box, and bam, you've got the Apple TV 2G.

They get to spread the development costs of their silicon and OS over these four product lines. Talk about efficient reuse of your development investment. I own three separate devices powered by an A4 CPU and iOS operating system.

wmf• 15 years ago

Yet somehow the same strategy is not working that well for Android tablets and STBs.

ZeroGravitas4• 15 years ago

It's even more efficient when you just relabel a standard chip you bought from Samsung and just tell everyone that you've put lots of effort into designing it. Works much better than I'd have imagined anyway.

zmmmmm3• 15 years ago

It depends what you mean by successful. The Android tablets are selling reasonably well - ASUS is claiming ~1 million sales (to consumers) and forecasting 1m more by the end of the year. It ain't iPad level but it's a strong showing and it's just one tablet out of half a dozen.

fpgeek3• 15 years ago

Moreover, ASUS is following the Transformer up with the eee Pad Slider in September and a second-generation Transformer using Tegra 3 Kal-El (though the release-date rumors for this vary). In other words, ASUS isn't just talking the talk, they're walking the walk.

Tichy• 15 years ago

Companies seem to give in too quickly, though. The tablet thing has only just started. Most non-ipad tablets simply sucked. Instead of giving in, they should create better tablets.

flogic• 15 years ago

I agree. It's going to take some time for manufacturers to pull their heads out of there asses on tablets. If you want to compete with Apple, your tablet has to be cheaper. Otherwise, why would anyone buy it? And, it has to not completely suck.

spitfire2• 15 years ago

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.

mrich2• 15 years ago

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.

forgotAgain2• 15 years ago

I think he agrees with you. The solution he has come up with is to turn HP into a company he is the right CEO for. No hardware, more ERP type software. Shades of SAP which is where he was before HP.

Not a great business plan if you ask me. You see it a lot in sports: change all of the players to match the new coach's plan rather than adapting the plan to fit the players you have. Usually they stumble around for a few years during the "turnaround" and then repeat the cycle with the next coach.

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

I thought Ruby was running WebOS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Rubinstein

Of course, he might have been constrained by the CEO.

mbesto2• 15 years ago

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.

virtica• 15 years ago

Apotheker has a vision. His specialty is to steer companies away from the consumer market and to make them enterprise oriented. I have to believe that this was the game plan when he was hired.

brudgers3• 15 years ago

I don't see Apple heading into the enterprise market. Anything they sell to enterprise is just a bonus - their model remains to sell devices with a three year support lifecycle and no concern for legacy systems and backward compatibility.

pohl• 15 years ago

I don't see Apple heading into the enterprise market.

Announced about a month ago...

http://www.apple.com/business/vpp/

spitfire2• 15 years ago

Steve Jobs got burnt badly by the enterprise market with NeXT. Look up enterprise object framework sometime.

Apple is clearly going after the enterprise market on their terms, and their terms alone.

taylorbuley2• 15 years ago

I've had my hands on one of these tablets. It could not connect to WPA Enterprise, so I sort of have a feeling they weren't really thinking about business adoption to begin with.

sciurus5• 15 years ago

HP recently did a lunch-and-learn for the IT staff at my university. They had marketing material that heavily pitched WebOS as the basis of enterprise-ready products.

sciurus5• 15 years ago

Apple never had a well-developed enterprise strategy, but after killing the xserve and xserve raid and integrating their server software with their consumer OS at least they have a coherent one: they don't care about it.

soapdog• 15 years ago

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

j_col2• 15 years ago

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.

ja2ke3• 15 years ago

They're solving that by no longer releasing products.

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

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)

Apocryphon3• 15 years ago

And then there were 2 and a half.

lukifer2• 15 years ago

Blackberry counts as a half? Seems high.

Apocryphon3• 15 years ago

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

martingordon2• 15 years ago

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?

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

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.

sleight422• 15 years ago

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

robtoo• 15 years ago

patent detente

The patent trolls don't understand detente. They don't understand MAD. They're the real threat, not Apple/Microsoft/Motorola/HTC/whoever.

kqr2• 15 years ago

This is a nice graphic summary of who's suing who in the mobile space:

http://blog.thomsonreuters.com/index.php/mobile-patent-suits...

A-K3• 15 years ago

$1.2B for the acquisition, sure, but what about the money put into the development of the TouchPad, Pre 3, etc, in addition to the costs of distribution and marketing?

Regardless, it does seem like they could still make a hefty profit off of selling the patents (and if there's one thing we all need more of, it's patent talk...)

martingordon2• 15 years ago

Which is exactly my point: they would be in an even better position had they not even developed those new devices and enhancements to the OS. At least we got a year's worth of innovation before they realized it made more sense to sell the patents rather than the product.

orky72• 15 years ago

what i think lawyers and justice departments want patent war to go on as it will profit them, and this people are very powerful they know the laws inside out. Lawmakers or the congress will not pass any legislation to curb this problem as it profit many people its a money making pot. so the patent war will go on as usual and google or any other company will have to take concrete steps to shield themself.

GHFigs• 15 years ago

But $/patent is a silly measurement, and there is no indication that HP is interested in selling or Google interested in buying.

nwatson• 15 years ago

Maybe HP's interested in suing.

Qa8BBatwHxK8Pu• 15 years ago

i say patent has grown obsolete.

astrodust• 15 years ago

Getting rid of them isn't a perfect solution, but it's arguably a better situation than keeping them.

ralfd2• 15 years ago

The patent portfolio of Palm is maybe not much worth. The WebOS was introduced 2009 and postdates the iPhone.

And Palm did in 2003 spun off their operating system (think of the Treo PDA/Smartphones), which was then bought by a japanese company (Access ltd). Microsoft did license last year a few dozen "Palm" patents from them. I guess any valuable patents date from that time frame but are not owned by Palm anymore.

adamtmca• 15 years ago

Huh?

They paid 1.2B to acquire those patents and Palm itself. It seems obvious that the market values those patents at somewhere < 1.2 billion.

Even if they've appreciated of late, their selling price last year is probably a lot more instructive as to their value than "$/patent" in the Motorola deal.

checoivan• 15 years ago

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.

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

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

18pfsmt• 15 years ago

I'd rather see them come out brandishing the Palm brand, and acquiring Fon, and then going after a "home cloud" machine. We could use the "unlimited" home connections we already pay for that are often pretty good (<40ms latency, at least 2mbps up). Handling the home-router firewall in a simplistic way seems to be the best way forward.

taylorbuley2• 15 years ago

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

floppydisk2• 15 years ago

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.

MatthewPhillips4• 15 years ago

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.

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

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.

msie• 15 years ago

Or next to the Apple Lisas. Or the EV1s.:-(

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

Actually, Apple sold out their Lisa stock after they rebranded it "Mac XL". Turns out there was a market for a "professional" Mac with an internal hard drive back then.

aninteger2• 15 years ago

They could try selling them. They never even released the Pre3 in the USA. I'm still waiting to buy.

tiles• 15 years ago

I was. Are you still planning on getting a Pre3 in spite of the announcement? I could deal with a smaller number of apps; but now I'm worried there simply won't be any apps at all for the ecosystem.

georgemcbay2• 15 years ago

Landfills are so 80s.

woot-offs are where not-so-successful consumer electronics go to die these days (and I say this as a big fan of woot, and bargain basement priced semi-abandoned technology).

reemrevnivek2• 15 years ago

If these things came up on Woot, I would buy three. Might get a few friends to buy some more.

The hardware is fine, and the open-source software that would surround such a release would, I'm sure, be awesome. Please, HP?

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

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.

illumin8• 15 years ago

I'd like to pick one up for $50 or less and try to shoe-horn Android on there.

xp8410• 15 years ago

They'll be on Woot by the end of the month. Mark my words. Maybe September. Estimated price point $219 for 16GB.

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

Apotheker behaved in a truly managerish way...

floppydisk2• 15 years ago

Or he's just further proof that most CEOs at large tech corporations seem to be lacking in the "vision" department.

Apocryphon3• 15 years ago

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

steveb2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

steveb2• 15 years ago

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... 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...

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.

xp8410• 15 years ago

> Expect PCs to still own the low-priced market

True. Until the generation who is now about 10 grows up and starts driving the PC buying decisions. They'll have been using tablets for 8 years or so and will think nothing of writing a paper on a tablet (bluetooth keyboards being easily available, although kids who have had smartphones since before puberty may end up being just fine typing everything on touch screens) and consuming all their media on a tablet and their smartphone. No bulky laptop required. What does a laptop add, from the point of view of a consumer? The ability to choose from a wide range of anti-virus software and browser toolbars?

So when they go to college, they will see a bargain basement PC laptop with Windows 10 Home Basic Limited Edition (~$600) or an iPad 11 ($500), or an Android "Vanilla Custard" tablet ($449). Which one will they choose? I don't know, but I know it's not the crappy laptop.

AAPL is positioning themselves in anticipation of that day, I have no doubt about it. They intend the iPad to be the "best" tablet the same way the iPod was the best MP3 player, and by 2007 everyone seemed to own an iPod. Once people are ready to let go of PCs the same way we let go of floppies, CRT monitors, and dial-up modems, they will be positioned as the smart choice.

barista2• 15 years ago

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.

bradly• 15 years ago

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.

canistr4• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

“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.

ja27• 15 years ago

As one of the few people that's actually used WebOS on a phone, when I try the TouchPad I'm baffled at how slow and clunky it is. The UI is smooth on even the Palm Pixi but on the TouchPad I get plenty of lag and glitches.

ww520• 15 years ago

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

anigbrowl4• 15 years ago

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.

lukifer2• 15 years ago

No one seems to remember that it took the iPod 3-4 years to take over the MP3 market.

HP also bungled by not offering a 7" model, and not competing on price from the very beginning, even if it meant running at a loss to chase market share.

zmmmmm3• 15 years ago

Agreed. You have to wonder how they ever thought they would succeed if they were going to give in this easily. Any fool could see it was going to be harder than the effort they've made so far. It was always premised on pushing WebOS on all their PCs and other strategic ways to promote it ... none of which ever got even tried.

voyou• 15 years ago

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.

andrewljohnson• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

ansy3• 15 years ago

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?

saturdaysaint2• 15 years ago

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..

nvictor• 15 years ago

googoolora :)

i'm quite fond of that new name.

xp8410• 15 years ago

> 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.

revorad• 15 years ago

"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.

Splines2• 15 years ago

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?

joezydeco• 15 years ago

The calculator group was shut down, an HP division in Australia tried to revive it a while back. I think the HP calculators that are still being sold are done by a Korean OEM.

sciurus5• 15 years ago

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

asmithmd1• 15 years ago

That HP is still very much alive in their spin-off of lab and testing equipment, Agilent Technologies Inc

dman• 15 years ago

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

dgregd• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

wallflower2• 15 years ago

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

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

bodyfour• 15 years ago

If they had successfully turned WebOS into a major player in the phone/tablet market it could have been a business worth tens of billions. It's perfectly possible that they thought "there's a 90% chance that this will fail, but it's still a smart gamble"

The part that surprised me is that they're apparently killing off the hardware entirely. I'd assumed that their fallback position would be to become another Android manufacturer and at least make use of the Palm hardware expertise they bought. I guess they don't even think they can make a go of it in that market.

donw2• 15 years ago

Stupid, no. Cowards, yes. I haven't seen a bold, risky move out of HP since... well, since they bought Palm and announced full-steam on WebOS.

blinkingled3• 15 years ago

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!

p0ppe• 15 years ago

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"

xp8410• 15 years ago

#goingdownwiththeship?

mathoda• 15 years ago

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.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

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.

sciurus5• 15 years ago

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

azth• 15 years ago

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."

hollerith2• 15 years ago

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.

donw2• 15 years ago

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.

ra• 15 years ago

That's exactly how I feel; WebOS is everything I want in a tablet platform.

Seriously HP, how do you expect us to trust you next time you woo us to develop for your platform?

Maybe there won't be a next time.

Steko6• 15 years ago

I wonder if one of those nervous Android licensees will pick up the WebOS assets as a hedge.

It's a shame Nokia didn't have the balls/foresight to buy Palm, they could have been shipping gorgeous Nokia crafted WebOS phones for the last couple quarters instead of getting slaughtered by Android et al.

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

> next time you woo us to develop for your platform?

What next time? HP jumped off a cliff. There will be no next platform. Not from them.

chaostheory2• 15 years ago

I can't help but think of MS in this situation. It reminds me of MS breaking into the video game console market and fighting really hard to stay in it. Even after a major hardware snafu that cost them an estimated 3 billion dollars they kept fighting. After six years of work, it's finally doing well.

WebOS was worth fighting for and it was in better shape than the 1st and 2nd Xbox IMO. What a waste.

isani• 15 years ago

Was it worth it for Microsoft, though? Their entertainment unit made 32 million dollars in profit last quarter – a quarter which they considered an immense success. With that kind of income, the project will never break even, never mind turn an overall profit. Even if you consider intangibles like strengthening the Windows platform, it's hard for me to believe that those billions were best invested into Xbox.

spaghetti• 15 years ago

After developing for iPhone/iPad I was excited to port apps to WebOS. Trying out my officemate's TouchPad was a great experience. I bet Apple is letting out a sigh of relief... the HP TouchPad was imo on par with the iPad.

olefoo2• 15 years ago

So, why wasn't it as appealing to the broader base of consumers?

I played with one for a bit at Best Buy, but it felt clunky and didn't look as good as the ipad. OTOH I didn't buy an iPad either, as tablets just don't work for me.

paul92902• 15 years ago

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?

chaostheory2• 15 years ago

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.

ja2ke3• 15 years ago

Nintendo has disregarded non-gaming software, especially software aimed at connectivity, or at software as a service, pretty consistently. The WiiU and the 3DS don't seem to have made any advances in that department. While the WiiU won't use the insane friend code system, 2010's 3DS still does. Ever since the Wii debuted with an integrated (but simple) OS, I have hoped that Nintendo will get on board with that stuff.

Microsoft really pushed having an integrated console dashboard and operating system, and Sony has slowly caught up with the big pieces over the life of the PlayStation 3, but whenever it's mentioned to Nitnendo, they seem to take pity on the questioner for seeing any importance in it, giving online, connectivity, and software as service a grimace-ridden "that's nice, dear," before going back to putting more gyroscopes and polarized displays in their disconnected, single player peripherals.

I just don't think it's in their culture, and they don't seem ready to make a shift.

mmariani• 15 years ago

That's a great vision, but I think it's highly unlikely to happen.

A scenario I can see developing itself would be one where Samsung, LG, or HTC buys WebOS. Either, to have an edge in this patent mess, and/or in response to Motorola acquisition by Google.

Interesting times.

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

> Time for Nintendo to buy WebOS

And do what Access did for the original PalmOS?

I'm sorry. I am just not feeling optimistic right now. It's bedtime for me. See you all tomorrow.

MatthewPhillips4• 15 years ago

I was just rewatching this video and got sad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY4HDftIllw

Enyo let you write HTML5 apps in Chrome, Firefox or whatever, and essentially (to simplify) add a few WebOS hints and you have a fully functional native app. More than anything else, I hope Enyo becomes completely open source so we can write html5 cross-os apps that are as snappy as those on WebOS with a framework that lets you create reuseable parts.

MatthewPhillips4• 15 years ago

Also, WebOS daemons/services were just node.js scripts. How awesome is that.

emehrkay3• 15 years ago

I feel silly for not developing any apps. It is just JavaScript and CSS. I've heard that a million time, but never really looked into it.

edit: booting into webos would be booting into a browser the same way booting into chrome os is booting into a browser.

jianshen• 15 years ago

I would've loved to see ChromeOS + WebOS.

I was just on a Virgin America flight where they were lending out Chromebooks to try and part of me thought why aren't they lending out tablets on a plane instead?

And porting some of those chromeOS apps would've been pretty easy...

KevinEldon• 15 years ago

HP is not developing hardware for WebOS. They will probably try and license the software. Spinning off the PC division might actually allow their consumer products to get the right focus and agility to compete against Apple on something other than price. Trying to fight Apple and IBM (and Cisco, and Dell, etc.) as one giant company is bad for HP's shareholders and HP's customers.

teyc• 15 years ago

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.

jsz02• 15 years ago

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.

fpgeek3• 15 years ago

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.

hollerith2• 15 years ago

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?

recoiledsnake11• 15 years ago

Like they gave up on the XBox while bleeding billions?

nQuo• 15 years ago

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.

jabo• 15 years ago

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

nnutter2• 15 years ago

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.

watmough• 15 years ago

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.

jp• 15 years ago

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.

Luyt• 15 years ago

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...

jamieb• 15 years ago

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.

westajay• 15 years ago

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?

It’s Official: HP Kills Off webOS Phones and the TouchPad

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