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Another one bites the dust: HP Kills Off webOS Phones & The TouchPad Another one bites the dust: HP Kills Off webOS Phones & The TouchPad
By Salar Golestanian @ 19 Aug 2011 :: Article Rating :: Technology News
 
Technology giant HP has announced major plans to restructure the company, discontinuing its months-old tablet product and mobile phone lines and selling-off its personal computer business. Developed after HP's $1.2 billion purchase of Palm and its critically acclaimed webOS operating system, the HP TouchPad has struggled in spite of a multi-million dollar marketing campaign to promote its launch.

In the hours leading up to their Q3 conference call later today, HP has just confirmed that they will be discontinuing operations surrounding the TouchPad and all webOS phones. WebOS had reached a critical failure point and everyone doubted the technology will make it through. Why? Because WebOS just did not grab the mindshare it needed to flourish.

The bottom line was that HP is where good ideas go to die. The company isn’t fast enough to move and therefore they are not set up to think like a scrappy start-up. WebOS could not be rolled into laptops, the WebOS tablet product could not compete with iPpad or Android  devices and was likely to be overtaken by Windows 8 tablets, and the long, twisted tale of Palm will ended sadly with a whimper. 

On the phone side there is just no room for a third (or fourth (or fifth)) player in the smartphone market right now with Android and iOS battling it out and Windows Phone creeping up behind the two leaders. HP can’t pivot out of this and, in the end, they have pulled the plug on the cash drain. 

I don't know how HP can save face - TouchPad only lasted 49 days before its death. 

On TechCruch there is a great article on how they can capitalize and fill the gap that Google has just left open.

Opening webOS:
  1. Share webOS’ source code. Bits of webOS are already available under a GPL license, but it’s time to open the rest as much as possible. So a full Open Source Product

  2. Give It Away. For free. But only to those willing to help make it better

  3. I do like this idea - With Android’s popularity and free-except-for-patent-licensing price tag and Windows Phone 7 floating around as an alternative, webOS licenses would be a rather hard sell. That’s why HP needs to just give it away.

  4. HP and others should know better that these days you need more than just a billion USD to enter smartphone/tablet arena.

  5. Plan to be hands-off, no-competition software provider that Google has decided they don’t want to be anymore. 

  6. Form a foundation to guide the overall product

  7. Control the direction of the development and don't let it get forked.

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About General News and BlogTopics by Salar Golestanian
These are various short and long News Articles and Blogs by Salar Golestanian the founder of SalarO.com about the latest topics that interest me. The subject matter are mixed topics from Web Trends, Technology, Software, Science or Current Afair, or whatever that can affect Internet Technology in any shape or form.  I have been told that the best place for these would have been for me to place them on a page at SalarO.com, However, some of these Blogs have less of a commercial or corporate genra, so they are placed here in this personal site. These Blogs help me explain a little more than normally is allowed in the 140 character real-estate of a typical Twitter post. They may also link you to the actual news or site that can expands further on my comments.

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