WebOS: It Is Do Or Die Time | Hacker News Reader

WebOS: It Is Do Or Die Time

conceivablytech.com

27 pointspeternorton32 comments

HP needs to partner with some corporations to design and develop some business/industry heavy applications specifically tailored to the partners business models so the new Pre and Touchpad will cash in on the private sector where RIM has dropped the ball. I owned a Palm Pixi and Pre, the Pixi construction was shotty, but they basically gave them away. The Pre is a solid device and if it weren't for the ghost town of apps in comparison to iOS the device would be a lot more functional then given credit. I think were going to see as a lot more of HP and webOS come summer, why do you think they keep running all these headlines...

I'm sure there are issues related to large-scale hardware design and production that I don't completely understand, but for the love of god Palm/HP; do something about your hardware. We could start with trying a different form factor for your flagship model (different iterations of the same form factor only please the market base you already have.) HW quality could also stand to be improved (I realize my Sprint Pre is nearly two years old at this point, but it would be nice if the volume buttons, battery, and lower quarter of the touchscreen still worked.) And finally, how about Apotheker's quote that "HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have"? Oops, guess we were just kidding about that.

It's a shame that such a great OS is cast to irrelevancy because of the way the hardware has been managed.

They seem to be doing work on that. Granted, their new hardware is just barely coming along with the Veer, Pre 3 and TouchPad. Time will tell how much of the old Palm designs they can fix.

Agreed. The Veer looks like it was specifically engineered for children.

It is similar in size to the Xperia mini series.

On the eve of a huge product launch -- the HP TouchPad -- wtf kind of CEO goes and scares all his troops like that over one quarter?

I echo the suggestion in another discussion- bring back the PDA! HP can use webOS to forge a different path, reinvent non-smartphone devices!

Completely agreed. The iPod Touch market is huge, and HP has the deep pockets to buy in volume and keep up in price.

HP should take on android head-on by uploading WebOS to GitHub and promoting it to handset manufacturers. HP has a sizable chunk of the PC space without an OS of their own

And how would they profit from it?

Google profits from Android phones mostly indirectly, through increased mobile web usage. HP has no such revenue source.

Could HP make money licensing the OS to other mobile manufacturers?

It would have to compete against Android, which is almost free and against WP7, which has a, much likely, negative price tag.

I think webOS is one of the most innovative mobile operating systems out there.

Palm didn't have the marketing and operations muscle to fulfill demand. Even now, the most modern webOS device you can buy in Spain is the Palm Pixi.

HP's been looking after touch interfaces for years (remember the TouchSmart?) and now they have a quite good OS to work with. Have anyone considered what a webOS interactive whiteboard would be like?

The problem is that they are no Apple nor Google in marketing terms, though is soon for them to make a move. I hope that in summer, when the Touchpad and the Pre3 are ready all hell will break loose.

And if things don't go well for them, we should start to think about the BeOS legacy curse.

It's pretty hard to call webOS a chopping block item. I'm sure they know better than to kill it off before any momentum is gained. They just _barely_ released the Veer. Regardless of what they claim of reviews, time still needs to play out towards what seems to be their bigger bet: the webOS TouchPad.

I don't see any demand for WebOS devices. At this point it would be a niche play and compete with WindowsPhone/BlackBerry/Symbian. Symbian is all but dead, WindowsPhone just has too much steam and with iOS and Android there simply aren't developers caring to spend the time on WebOS.

If they can get a really slick phone out, or a series of really slick phones, WebOS will make a lot of headway, I think. People are attracted by shiny. If they can manage to get an app store of respectable size and put a lot of marketing behind desirable hardware, they have a good chance, imo.

I think a large part of this is that smart phone buyers are likely on either cheap phones (barely hitting android on the lowest end) or contract phones. Signing a two year contract or putting down $600+ to get a phone is not a commitment most people make unless they trust the brand. HP is out of luck with phones IMO... I'd play the TouchPad angle the most and strongly consider doing an iPod touch like device if I were them.

I don't think most people care about "brand trust" too much (some do), HTC is one of the most profitable handset makers and most people don't even know the company exists. For most people, they buy what their friend has, what they saw on tv, what the salesguy shoves in their face.

The brand in this case has been Android lately. Even so, HTC was successful well before the new wave of smartphone competition because people actually tried phones in stores. I rarely hear about someone picking a phone out in store vs. hearing about phones on the web.

HP just seems incredibly stupid. I mean, they're already $1.2B in on this, and they desperately need apps. Why not spend $50MM, go to a bunch of devs, and commission apps? Offer aggressive rev sharing and a guaranteed minimum $50K. $50K ea is enough to get some people to build out apps and that gets you a thousand apps. If they have to scrap WebOS an extra 4% and change doesn't really make it that much worse of an investment, while if this works, the upside is huge.

They could just have gotten an SDK out sooner. That was a huge problem in 2009, and the defense was "we're just little old Palm, we're not big enough to do all that!" (bunk? who knows at that time?). HP, one of the largest companies on the planet, 2 years later, does the same thing - announces product with 6+ months before it's available, with no SDK to develop against for new product.

I agree on your notion of payment, but many people would have been happy to do it for $0, but with no SDK, how do you do that?

Others would have been happy for 10% of those - $5k to develop some apps, perhaps to some particular requirements from HPalm. Or run an app request forum, set up bounties, let the community vote on them, and pay the winning entries.

Yes, in the grand scheme, another few million in developer relations and community building is hardly even a rounding error given what they've put in so far. But hey - why innovate when you can try the same techniques that worked so well 2 years earlier?

Their only chance is to open source it, and hope others will use it too to gain momentum. On their own, it won't stand a chance. If several handset manufacturers backed my Microsoft could barely scratch the surface, how are they hoping to beat that?

Since WebOS's app platform is HTML5/JS, an interesting convergence with browser app stores could happen here and allow WebOS devices an easier bootstrap, since the code could also run in the Chrome and (forthcoming) Mozilla app stores without much modification (theoretically, anyway).

They'd be smart to continue and expand upon that thread by working on leveraging existing technologies as much as possible, since smart phone platforms are, much like normal OS platforms, all about the software that third parties develop for them.

I've always thought that WebOS was a much more suited mobile OS for Google than Android is. WebOS is more compatible with Google's web vision, and if they had WebOS they wouldn't even need ChromeOS anymore. It's a shame WebOS didn't appear sooner, before Google bought/launched Android.

Declaring WP7 dead in the water after 1 batch of phones is like saying Android was dead after the first couple phones fizzled. The upside certainly doesn't look as good but the fact is these OS's all seem to launch in beta and most of the market is brand new customers not locked into anything yet.

Open sourcing Web OS would remove all chance HP has to profit from it. I think there's a good chance HP, MS and others will follow RIMs lead and leverage Android's ecosystem (and/or Chrome's) while bribing the high profile app developers for native ports of the highest demand apps.

I think criticism of WP7 is more of a generalized indictment of MS's shoddy mobile strategies. Remember the Kin?

When it came out I thought Palm had the best app model of all the mobile platforms out there. Its a shame they could not push it enough. Of course they ran out of money and HP was not aggressive enough with it. If they do cut it though it would be unfair as they never really did anything with the platform.

This is an excellent moment for Microsoft to pitch Windows Phone 7 tied to a "WP7 partner discount" on Windows 7 OEM licenses.

Sadly, I must add. WebOS is much smoother and overall nicer than Android. It's also much easier to program for.

So it's die then. You can't even buy WebOS devices in many (most?) countries so how they expect to gain any market share at all is beyond me.

Keep in mind that the only existing devices with WebOS were released by Palm. HP releases might mean a completely different strategy (then again they might not...). The only "new" WebOS device is Veer, which came out on 15th of May - in US only, but with pretty good deal in AT&T network.

So I wouldn't say "it's die" just yet. Let's wait at least ~2-3 months after they release Pre3 or Touchpad. Declaring something dead 2 days after rebrand / re-release is a bit early.

True, but HP has even less mobile expertize than Palm, and I think they're trusting the Palm division to deliver a successful product.

I'd say the hope is that Palm has the capability to do just that with the resources HP brings (cash flow and other existing hardware vendor relationships).

I'm skeptical that it will be an iPhone like explosion in any case and people expecting that to happen because a product is good should start getting ready for disappointment. That sort of growth is a factor of many more things than just the product. Apple nailed a lot more than the product the first round and that momentum has allowed them to fix the rather mediocre start with the iPhone.

I will say that I've just barely taken the webOS plunge and I like it. It's everything I expected and that's a good thing since I'm a picky user (having owned both iOS and Android phones, I've never felt satisfied with either).

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