The future of webOS

[Graham]

I was mulling over the fact that HP said that although it was killing off its hardware business it had no immediate plans to divest itself of webOS, and it struck me that this fire sale of Touchpads may be a play to build up a reasonable user base quickly.

HP could then continue to make money through webOS apps and services while looking around for other hardware manufacturers and licensing partners.

While mulling, I found this article with a view from inside HP which is worth reading:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/0...lly-went-down/

HP made the announcement that it was ceasing to make webOS hardware, but neglected to get a hardware licensing deal in place before doing so. This seemed to drive home the point that webOS was dead in the water, when in fact it is very much alive and was never the issue. It was the hardware that was killing HP’s OS.

If HP had announced a licensing deal before the discontinuation of the hardware, the news would have gone much differently today. There would be no stories about the ‘death of webOS’, an OS that many of us thought was just starting to get good.

But HP did not secure licensing and now the most popular byline is about the death of webOS. But the whole inside story of the shuttering of HP’s webOS hardware division is far more interesting than the way it appeared from the outside and things might not be as grim for webOS as they first appear.

Graham

[JD Gumby]

At the very least they'll have to keep their app store open for a while since it will be the only way they'll ever recoup the costs from getting well under 1/3rd of even just the parts cost ($300-$325 according to teardowns. Add in manufacturing, R&D, shipping, and marketing costs and I'd surprised if they're getting even a fifth of their costs back).

[RainingLemur]

I hope that webOS doesn't go the way of the dodo. I actually like the way it looks and works. But, at this point, I really don't have too high of hopes with the way that they're going.

[hunnymonster]

Well they released an update to WebOS yesterday... who knows where it goes next though.

[monkeyluis]

WebOS is now called Ice Cream Sandwich and is handled by Google.