Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/29/amazon-buy-palm/

by mjfern • 15 years ago

175 98 15 years ago

rkalla2• 15 years ago

We saw the launch of the Kindle Fire and have seen Amazon's hand with the custom build of Android that looks/feels nothing like Android... anyone have any guesses why they would want WebOS?

Amazon already has the Android store, all the Android integration done for the Fire and the Java/Android expertise in house... where does WebOS fit in?

ary• 15 years ago

User interface design perhaps? Although my impression is that all that talent already bailed on HP.

sksultan• 15 years ago

a) HP's probably offering it for pennies. Too good of a deal for any tablet/mobile player.

b) Amazon Silk is a game changer that probably has Google fuming. Buying Palm is probably a hedge bet in case Google clamps down. The end-user platform(devise, OS, browser) war between Google, Apple, and MS is to control the user data. Amazon wants to make sure it has an unrestricted piece of that data.

rkalla2• 15 years ago

Interesting take on it being a preemptive move. I wouldn't have seen that kind of competitive advantage in owning Palm... again, since it doesn't look to be a talent acquisitions and it isn't for patents (?) then the only thing left is WebOS, in which case what do these guys want with a incompatible clean-room OS?

Google already has too many mobile OS's and Amazon's expertise is elsewhere.

I feel like I'm missing some core component of Palm here that makes it valuable to even still be talked about. Had they had some amazing version of Android with a custom browser and all that, I'd understand this a lot more quickly.

pyrmont• 15 years ago

Amazon is just about to start encouraging people to buy Android applications for the Amazon App Store that presumably wouldn't work on a webOS tablet. If Amazon are in the running, it can only be for the patent portfolio.

If Google were to clamp down on Android, why wouldn't Amazon just continue developing their Android fork? Seems like it would be a lot more effort to get webOS to where they need it to be.

mappu• 15 years ago

I don't know if Silk has Google "fuming"..

Opera Mini has been doing the remote-rendering thing for years and years now. It is the most widely used mobile browser, with 113+ million users and 2+ billion daily pageviews.

potatolicious• 15 years ago

Does it have to be the webOS division? I'd imagine Amazon wouldn't have that much interest in Palm's software, but Palm is also one of the few entities in North America that has experience designing hardware from end to end.

We know that Amazon had to outsource the design and build of the Fire to an outsider, no doubt it would be preferable to bring that in-house to a team of world class industrial designers.

knotty66• 15 years ago

The hardware was the weakest link. Also, It was my understanding that a lot of the hardware division have been released recently.

Maybe Amazon just want some patents, some good engineers and a backup OS for leverage against Google?

r00fus• 15 years ago

The patents alone would be worth it to Amazon... who likely have no really interesting mobile hardware or software patents of their own.

Interesting note about Ruby's being on the Amazon board too, didn't notice that earlier.

fpgeek• 15 years ago

To me the detail that doesn't ring true is that HP would sell Palm at a substantial loss. Last I heard, people thought HP could at least recoup the purchase price (or more) based on the "value" of Palm's patents alone. I suppose HP could be selling Palm with only patent licenses (instead of the patents themselves), but that seems like a strange thing to do on both sides.

If HP were being clever, I could see them leaking their discussions with Amazon right now (when Amazon is on everyone's mind) as a way to motivate the "real" buyer (presumably Google or Apple). But I don't give HP credit for being that clever.

michaelpinto• 15 years ago

I first misread that as "Amazon in talks to buy HP" and what's funny is that it didn't shock me. On the other hand if they only got Palm that would be great for IP.

daeken2• 15 years ago

Please do, then sell Be off to someone that will do something with it. Please?

kylec• 15 years ago

Be went with PalmSource back when Palm was split into PalmOne and PalmSource. PalmOne then re-became Palm and was acquired by HP, but PalmSource was picked up by ACCESS.

daeken2• 15 years ago

Wow, I had no idea how that all went down. Thanks for the info.

protomyth• 15 years ago

The Haiku Project http://haiku-os.org/ is getting rather close.

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

I hope that whomever HP sells Palm off to will bring back the brand.

elithrar• 15 years ago

> I hope that whomever HP sells Palm off to will bring back the brand.

I think the Palm brand is "too far gone" in the public mindset to be worth bringing back. The Amazon brand is a far stronger, far more popular brand and its important that they don't dilute that right as they launch the Fire.

Acquiring Palm, to me, would be so they can acquire patents, some developers and designers, and some tech. WebOS, nice as it is, has missed the train. Amazon would be insane to backflip now (even I wish they'd used WebOS to begin with).

markokocic• 15 years ago

I would like that to happen. I was never a fan of Palm products, but WebOS seems like a nice alternative OS for mobiles and tablets.

I'm sure Amazon would know how to handle it better than HP.

modeless4• 15 years ago

What would Amazon do with WebOS when they have already invested so much in Android? Switching would require them to abandon the app store they built. The Silk browser seems at odds with how WebOS works. All their Android UI customizations would have to be rewritten.

avree2• 15 years ago

Amazon has shown that they're open to pivots and trying new things before. I wouldn't be surprised if they made two different lines of Kindles, with different OS's. They are trying to achieve market dominance with the Amazon App Store—with WebOS they could truly achieve market dominance since they'd be the main source of apps.

eurleif• 15 years ago

But the Kindle Fire is supposed to be an appliance. It's supposed to Just Work. Adding a second tablet with a different OS would confuse Amazon's target audience.

bradya• 15 years ago

Those are all sunk costs (they can't go back in time and change them) - so they are likely evaluating the deal with the long-term future in mind.

j_col8• 15 years ago

Look at it this way: their are about 1 million Touchpad users already out their due to the HP firesale. That's a nice market to buy, considering these people will want to upgrade to something in 12-18 months time, while keeping their profiles and all of the webOS software they bought (the app market in webOS land is thriving by the way since the massive influx of new users). I think whatever software work they would have to do to make this happen would be worth it to them.

Also remember they would be free of Google and Android, and all of the legal battles happening in that space right now. webOS is so far removed from any of the other platforms out there that there is no danger of being sued by someone for copying them.

modeless4• 15 years ago

Amazon has probably 10 times that many Kindle users or more already, and if HP sells Palm at a 90% discount that's still $120 per TouchPad user who may or may not ever upgrade to an Amazon Kindle. That would be a stupid way to acquire users.

Also, if you think WebOS is somehow immune to the plague of lawsuits in this industry you're crazy. Nobody is safe from lawsuits. It's just a cost of doing business these days; you pay your success tax and you move on.

w33ble6• 15 years ago

I don't buy that they are buying user profiles. The ability to run WebOS apps on the Kindle would be interesting, but buying such a small app market and spending the extra money to integrate it, I don't know if I buy that. And a complete move the WebOS? Abandoning the people who bought in to the Amazon App Store? No way. Moving to WebOS and making that able to run Android apps makes more sense, but I still don't see any incentive there. The Fire will be a huge success, and it looks like it works pretty good out of the box, and that should only improve with time. Why would they bother to start over with a move to WebOS?

kgen• 15 years ago

It is a little premature to say that there is no danger of being sued as most of the litigation around Android surfaced recently (almost after it began to gain traction) and not back in 2008 when it first launched?

With all the bogus patents out there, it is hard to imagine any complex mobile system that doesn't infringe on _something_ out there.

iradik2• 15 years ago

Talent buy

wheels• 15 years ago

My guess is a bunch of embedded Linux hackers and a large patent portfolio, which relative other vendors they're quite short on. Maybe webOS would be recycled as an OS for the ePaper products or something, but I wouldn't bet on its future even if it does go over to Amazon.

Even so it's a hard deal for me to get my head around. Amazon is not an acquisition-happy company. There's usually very clear alignment and they've never done a big talent acquisition, so I suspect there'd have to be something very specific that they're after.

riffraff• 15 years ago

patents seem the big thing to me. If they are not cross licensing with microsoft/apple already they will probably get sued very soon, the Palm IP would be quite a big shield.

wanorris• 15 years ago

What if their plan is to buy the right to ship software updates to the million TouchPad owners?

On the simple end, they could port Kindle, MP3, Prime Video, etc., and make them available as part of of a firmware update.

If they really want to, though, they could even make an "official" upgrade to Amazon's fork of Android, with the Appstore and UI that the Fire has (more precisely, the one from the 10" Fire variant they're working on).

So that gets them: (1) patents they need, (2) a bunch of in-house expertise in the full tablet hardware and software stack, (3) a bunch of customers to sell their content to and convert to their ecosystem.

That pretty much puts every asset Palm has to use except for WebOS itself, and as someone posted earlier, even that might be useful as a hedge against Google's handling of Android.

brudgers2• 15 years ago

>"Switching would require them to abandon the app store they built."

There's no reason a company cannot have two app stores.

Indeed, even Apple does.

ssharp2• 15 years ago

Apple does, but for devices that are clearly different. There is clear differentiation between the iOS app store and the OSX app store. There is also clear differentiation between the iPhone and iPad sections on the app store. The three forms are physically different enough to draw a cognitive line in the sand. I doubt many people who own an iPhone think it's an iPad or own an iPad and think its a Mac.

If Amazon ultimately uses WebOS to get into the phone market, I could see them easily managing two different app stores easily. If they create one set of Android tablets and one set of WebOS tablets, it's going to be a bit trickier. All of this is really going to depend on how apps fair on the new Amazon tablet.

jsz0• 15 years ago

What would Amazon do with WebOS when they have already invested so much in Android?

Google can pull the rug out from under them at any time for any reason. You can't run a multi-billion dollar business on good faith alone. It would be nice to believe that Google wouldn't do that type of thing, and maybe they won't, but it's a huge risk to take. Amazon is playing to win this. They have to believe at some point the Fire and other Amazon tablets will be so successful that they can easily attract developers. (and we can't rule out some form of Android compatibility being added to WebOS -- something Palm may have already been working on and could be quite mature. If RIM managed it I'm pretty sure Palm can too)

modeless4• 15 years ago

What can Google do to Amazon? The only real ownership Google has over Android is in the market that Amazon's not using, and in the development of new versions which Amazon can easily ignore by forking for good (and that would probably hurt Google more than Amazon, by fragmenting the platform).

j_col8• 15 years ago

As a long-suffering webOS fan (Pre- through to Pre3 & Touchpad), all I have to say to this news is, yay! WebOS is a fantastic system that does not deserve to linger and die due to HP's lack of leadership and vision.

Jeff Bezzos, on the other hand, is a true visionary in my opinion and I would be happy to see my webOS HP Profile become an Amazon profile sometime soon.

My only doubt though: will they make phones?

zitterbewegung• 15 years ago

I don't think they will make phones or even continue webOS. I have a feeling that this is a talent acquisition and they will use it to improve the Kindle Fire.

j_col8• 15 years ago

Considering they already fired all of the hardware people, most of the talent have already gone (unless you mean't software, and it that case webOS is a pretty different system to Android, so it's not like Amazon would be picking up a few hundred Android developers here).

technoslut2• 15 years ago

They will undoubtedly make phones. Why give away a market to competitors that is worth billions? Amazon wants to keep users in their ecosystem. To do that you need a phone as well, which they're essentially already doing in their AppStore.

Within three years Amazon will come out with their own phone. It will be the same game plan that they used with the Fire and gear it towards the low end. Eventually they will go towards the high end.

Charmander• 15 years ago

Amazon will make iPod Touch like devices before they make phones (although the Kindle Fire already falls into that market segment due its price point).

This proposed webOS purchase is to hedge their bets against Google keeping ICS and future versions closed source. Amazon can't out a 10" Kindle tablet with the underlying system based on Gingerbread. The Amazon services could be provided but there would be no apps and games made for it.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

> Amazon can't out a 10" Kindle tablet with the underlying system based on Gingerbread.

Why not? What makes Gingerbread so inappropriate for a tablet compared to Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich? Amazon can tabletize Gingerbread in their fork.

iradik2• 15 years ago

This sounds like a large talent acquisition.

MichaelApproved• 15 years ago

With Fire, Amazon essentially has an independent OS. The only reason to by Palm would be that Google will not protect you as an Android maker and you need your own patent portfolio to defend yourself.

nodata2• 15 years ago

Didn't Amazon work with Google to create the Fire?

octover• 15 years ago

No, they didn't. The biggest sign you can see out in the open is that the Fire is running a fork of 2.3 Gingerbread instead of 3.0 Honeycomb or the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich.

Zakuzaa• 15 years ago

Probably for talent and patents acquisition.

spinchange• 15 years ago

It's the patents.

iand2• 15 years ago

The only way I can see this making sense is if Amazon could buy the supply chain relationships that HP must have built for their tablets. Probably HP have options/exclusivity deals on display and chip production for the coming years.

suivix• 15 years ago

Off-topic, but is there a reason you say 'HP have' instead of 'HP has'? I was talking to a few British guys at work about this and they thought it sounded odd as well.

alexholehouse• 15 years ago

If we're referring to HP as a single company it should be has ( - it has ...)

If we're referring to HP as a collective of things (i.e. individuals, such as the board) then it should be have ( - they have ....)

IMO I'd say it could be either really, though I would probably favour the singular.

karzeem• 15 years ago

"HP have" is British, "HP has" is American.

iand2• 15 years ago

Heh, I don't know :)

I'm British if it helps...

frankiewarren• 15 years ago

Could this have anything to do with the licensing fees that are becoming a reality with the Android ecosystem? It might be an incentive to bring things in house in the future (both hardware and software).

alexknight• 15 years ago

Even if this is true and it does happen, I would think Palm as a brand is dead. Even if the Fire 2 ends up having webOS, Amazon would never market it that way. Just as how Android is behind the scenes on the current Fire, they would do the same with webOS.

DotNetPete1• 15 years ago

great news

Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

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