It’s Official: HP Kills Off webOS Phones and the TouchPad
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
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.
What next time? HP jumped off a cliff. There will be no next platform. Not from them.
WebOS was worth fighting for and it was in better shape than the 1st and 2nd Xbox IMO. What a waste.
You can use a monopoly to get monopolies in other markets. You go into those other markets and take losses, until all others have quitted.
Then, when you have another monopoly, you can earn back the money. It might not have worked so well in the hardware games consoles.
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.
A fruity brand is important these days. Fashion dictates what people buy. "Fashion over function".
HP was really stupid launching the "Ouchpad" at prices similar to the iPad because the sum of iOS and its application support make it a better product. With a lower price, it could win some market share. WebOS deserved better management.
I do understand. The iPod is an excellent product and is priced very competitively. It's not, however, the best choice for everyone and you cannot neglect brand plays an important role in how consumers pick products. I would love to use a Macbook (and I could - a nice, shiny one has always been one intranet form away from me) but then I would have to struggle like my fellow colleagues do to tailor it to my rather specific tastes. For me, it's just not worth it. That's not to say I wouldn't love to have one - my heart wants it. My brain denies it to me because it's not the best choice.
And therefore, being unable to run iTunes (unless under a VM running Windows or a hackintosh) an iPad as useful to me as a brick.
> b) appears to think complex decisions are binary.
Have you ever seen a teen shopping for clothes? Why do you think shopping for a tablet is any different? Why do you think most people (who don't understand the differences between tablets) turn this into a complex decision? iPads are cool, Touchpads aren't (and they really lack appealing applications) and Androids are clunky (they really are, but they have other things to offer)
Saying "it's about the brand" is too simple because it could mean "Buzz / clinging to past glory" (i.e. the Sony strategy) or "well earned reputation for producing products people like" and heavily papering over the reasons in the latter case.
If you think 90% of people really weight pros and cons of a mostly technical decision, you are an optimist. I am not sure most people who buy iPads know every other tablet available (and that includes things like the Nook) can browse the web, use e-mail, watch videos, run Flash thingies and play Angry Birds. Apple enjoys a powerful reputation and it's often a good enough decision to go with an iPad when you are confused by a lot of slightly different offerings.
The Touchpad appears to have been rushed out before it was ready and its software has a great deal of problems, but I am quite sure those problems would have been fixed relatively soon. It's been on the market for only 45 days, after all.
WebOS 3.0 finally implemented GUI HW acceleration because if it was bad on the smartphone it would be unusable at tablet resolutions.
When people say that android is slow this what they mean, the interface doesn't flow it jerks.
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?
(1) Wii U will be a huge bust for holiday 2012 leading to...
(2) a huge bidding war a couple quarters later for Nintendo as an exclusive 3rd party.
(3) Microsoft will win, overpaying heavily.
(4) Shigeru Miyamoto's swan songs of Mario and Zelda with Kinect will be Co-Games of the Year 2013 but...
(5) less than a year later Nintendo will opt out of the Microsoft deal and produce for everyone.
The Wii U and 3DS might be disappointing, but Nintendo is a survivor. It has the internal support to last through dry spells on the strength of first party titles alone.
It would be very difficult for a company as resilient and conservative as Nintendo to sink itself in such a short time frame. Remember, too, this company also started off making playing cards 100 years ago.
The only bad end I could see in Nintendo's immediate future would be an aggressive if not hostile takeover. I believe its market cap is only $20 billion, and supposedly half of that is in cash. If Apple or Microsoft wanted to pay a premium for the ultimate maker of killer apps this is the time to make a move. In another cycle it will be too late: the mobile wars will be decided and/or Nintendo will likely have recovered. Who knows how well the company would survive a takeover though.
The same can be said about phones and portable video game systems. It's all ARM CPUs with Imagine GPUs. Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, webOS, Nintendo GBA/DS/3DS, Sony Vita all use the exact same chips from the same design firms.
The big hardware differentiator is what cost/performance balance you want to strike. Newer architectures with newer manufacturing processes cost more plain and simple. And there is a spectrum of other off the shelf components to round out the package.
There can be some play in getting more out of a design with engineering tricks or getting better components at the same cost with economies of scale. Or you can corner the market by buying out the entire manufacturing capacity of the best components to deny your competitors (or vice versa). But it's pretty much you get what you pay for.
Nintendo builds hardware two to three generations behind to save a lot on costs. Not because it doesn't know how to get something faster and better. The upcoming Wii U is basically an older PowerPC CPU with an older ATI GPU. If Nintendo wanted, it could create a crazy powerful console with a $1000 CPU and dual $600 GPUs that nobody would buy. All it needed to do was tell IBM and ATI what it wanted. It wasn't a matter of engineering that steered them away, but a matter of economics. Which if you remember right worked great in the short term for the Wii. But as everyone already knew wasn't a long term play. Hence the earlier-than-everyone-else release of the Wii U.
If it flops, who cares? They didn't spend huge amounts on loss-leading hardware, and they didn't need to make a huge investment in a cutting edge FPS only to be told it's not as good as Halo.
Apple (along with the Angry Birds developers) stole their lunch, with another cheap game machine, with an even cooler new control system. Eventually, that market will start to mature, and you will need 100 developers to make a good iOS game. And Nintendo won't want to touch that market with a barge pole, because it becomes a winner-takes-all bloodbath with huge entry costs.
The question is, is iOS an existential threat to the gaming market as a whole? If so, Nintendo will lose. If not, Nintendo will come up with some other wacky control system, and build a few fun (but simple) games staring Mario. People will buy it, because they want a bit of a change from their familiar, mature, and eventually boring touch games. Apple won't hurt them this cycle, because they are busy consolidating their monopoly on tables. Apple doesn't want to take over the gaming market - the 3DS was just a piece of collateral damage. Apple wants to sell a boring mature platform (with simple updates to performance, but no fundamental changes), not novelties that will need to be redesigned every 5 years. But the iPad just happens to be new enough to still be a novelty, and thus devastate Nintendo.
It's not about ability, it's a cogent choice to step back and not play into the arms race. They did the exact same thing with the DS, and outsold the (very significantly) more powerful PSP almost 3:1. And a few years earlier, the GameBoy brutalized the Game Gear.
In terms of raw power, the GC was the most powerful console of its generation (or tied with the Xbox). So was the N64. Neither panned out (though neither lost N money either), so Nintendo went into a different direction. And — at least for a time — struck gold.
You could argue that Nintendo will sell that converged home device but Wii U sure ain't it. No it will probably be the big app platforms (Windows, iOS/OS X, Android/linux) that win the home.
Nintendo harbors great will with consumers like Apple. WebOS seems to be a great mobile operating system.
To witness some true, fierce competition, Nintendo should mix their branding/games into WebOS & then allow developers to create games for their platform. WebOS already has 1,000s of apps created for it now.
Everyone currently in the market (RIM & Windows) are stale brands and do not harbor excitement amongst many demographics. Nintendo's brand loyalty stretches many demographics. From 16 to 24, 24 to 35 to 35 to 50.
How many iOS and Android users have searched for a mario game for their devices? HOw many people own Wii just so they can play these games?
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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: booting into webos would be booting into a browser the same way booting into chrome os is booting into a browser.
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...
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 $7B in profits off of webOS?
And while a few more entrepreneurs getting ground into hamburger by lawyers isn't that big of a concern in the larger scheme of things; it does mean that innovation in the tech sector is tamed and that we lose out on great products that never get a chance to compete in the marketplace.
The patent trolls don't understand detente. They don't understand MAD. They're the real threat, not Apple/Microsoft/Motorola/HTC/whoever.
http://blog.thomsonreuters.com/index.php/mobile-patent-suits...
Regardless, it does seem like they could still make a hefty profit off of selling the patents (and if there's one thing we all need more of, it's patent talk...)
And Palm did in 2003 spun off their operating system (think of the Treo PDA/Smartphones), which was then bought by a japanese company (Access ltd). Microsoft did license last year a few dozen "Palm" patents from them. I guess any valuable patents date from that time frame but are not owned by Palm anymore.
They paid 1.2B to acquire those patents and Palm itself. It seems obvious that the market values those patents at somewhere < 1.2 billion.
Even if they've appreciated of late, their selling price last year is probably a lot more instructive as to their value than "$/patent" in the Motorola deal.
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.
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.
“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.
You're picking and choosing a specific example when, if you recall everyone else, it was pretty much the same thing. Buggy software was the sole reason why the TouchPad or even WebOS failed.
This has gone on to be the core of the Apple mobile strategy--they don't worry about being first to market with every feature, rather the biggest concern is not to ship buggy/unreliable stuff that doesn't deliver on its promises. If at all possible.
Apple got to launch their incomplete-but-solid product and then spend a year or two refining it and incrementally adding features. That's the advantage of redefining/creating the market you launch in though, it doesn't extend to anyone else.
For anyone trying to compete with them now, they have to hit the ground running with a comparable-or-better feature set (which I assume is why Android vendors make so much fuss about Flash) _and_ comparable polish.
"Sole reason" I can't agree with, but WebOS has bugs that's for sure. I bought an HP Veer around Week 1. Last month I went back to my iPhone4 and I wouldn't go back (even before this announcement).
The Veer lags sometimes, for no obvious reason. Touches often register with the droplet effect, but fail to actually trigger the button you clearly hit. The Palm account had no way to update it online (better not forget to update your CC# before a purchase or you've effectively bricked the app-market). Mail was laggy, and seemed to rarely update properly. I couldn't have both my Work GoogleApps Mail, and my regular GMail on the phone as GMail accounts. I had to setup my personal account as an Exchange account.
None of these were instant deal-breakers, but with no updates, no fixes, and no communication I got tired of waiting for a fix that may never come.
Of course the app-store/market/whatever kinda sucked too.
My biggest peeve was copy & paste. Mentioned in another reply, but before the 2G iPhone I never had a real need for copy & paste since there weren't really worthwhile apps to copy & paste between on the feature-phones back then.
The WebOS copy/paste however absolutely sucks. It's tricky, I never remembered if it's Option+C or gesture-area+C no matter how many times I did it.
Oh, and the Veer screen was OK for most stuff, but waaay too small for web-browsing without Android's ability to re-flow text on zoom.
Signed, -A Guy With A Veer Sitting On The Shelf
Along with patches, it is quite smooth indeed. Of course, the argument can and should be made that it should have shipped this way.
It is possible to set up Google Apps and personal Gmail on the same phone. Simply select GMail and enter email addresses with full domain i.e. you@work.com and you@gmail.com
Viola.
I also installed a number of patches from Preware, but nothing to my knowledge really addresses any of these concerns.
The "laggy" effects are software, not CPU. Even another 50% CPU isn't going to help a 3-second pause every time you send an SMS. It isn't going to prevent clearly software related bugs in the Mail app. It's also not going to make the buggy software decide to start triggering events on buttons it's clearly already registering (due to the droplet indicator on taps).
It's not going to make copy/paste as smooth as a double-tap, drag a point to highlight selection, tap "Copy" and done. Honestly I never did figure out the way to highlight the selection I wanted consistently. I'm pretty sure text-selections are not an OS-wide feature.
Even if in the past 30 days community patches came out to address all these issues (I seriously doubt it), who wants to depend on the grace of others for a product you just paid $250 for a couple months ago when the company that sold you the product is more interested in releasing and patching/updating a tablet?
Add to that no Pre3, the 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 fragmentation, and it was clear that without some major, visible effort on HP's part the Veer was already dead.
Plus the damn phone doesn't provide an option to keep the screen off on the Touchstone charger without a community patch. That issue has been around since my old Pre Minus! Seriously WebOS? 9 out of 10 smartphone owners I know use their phone as their alarm clock. I don't want a damn flashlight to turn on 12" from my head on my nightstand at 3AM because I got an automated email. If it's not a SMS or Phone Call, turn off and stay off when I push the Lock button.
The one redeeming application on the app-store was the Remix music player. First non-iPhone music player I could get behind (I used to own a Nexus S, never found anything on Android that seemed to focus on the simple act of browsing your music library quickly and just playing). HP should've bought the app and replaced their ugly WinAmp3/Win95 era junk with it. :-) Too late now...
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.
1. http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/tablets/22...
My point was that saying the one true tablet is the iPad is false but HP is the wrong player to consider.
* best walk-in store in SF, btw
We will have more data points on that 'observation' when Windows 8 launches(April, say the rumors).
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.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digita...
It still makes the iPad look half baked.
but as is the way with MS they killed it and settled for mediocre.
I'm beggining to wonder if MS are actually scared of being innovative.
This might actually be a pretty good summary of MSFT's corporate culture.
The impression I always get from the inside is that it's a company dominated by middle managers. They've got so many PMs in so many layers that you'd wonder if it's just PMs all the way down.
The combination of mature, gigantic company, lack of strong leadership, and extremely generous benefits has combined to create a population of people who are there for the stability and extremely afraid of rocking the boat or killing the golden goose.
Making futuristic looking concept movies is pretty easy compared to actually making and shipping a physical product.
Anyway, thanks for the maximum 4 downvotes HN.
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.
Is it though? Shipments don't equal sales.
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.
Seriously, I doubt it's 5%
...they should at least make up numbers that are marginally ...
If your going to mock someone for "making up" numbers try not to make up numbers of your own in the same post. The op provided data, you did not. Unless you were going for irony; in that case, well never mind.
Despite this, I still routinely see android tablets in airports. I saw a galaxy tab 7" tonight (along with 3 people using ipads in first class). I've also seen a few galaxy tab 10.1s and a couple of HTC Flyers.
To be clear, I also wonder if the actual ratio is 4 to one. I just don't think the number is completely outside the realm of possibility.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
Android is now 20% of the tablet market, while the BB Playbook is nowhere and the HP TouchPad can't even stay alive for two months.
Edit: Someone posted the link below.
Anyone who thinks Android would be the leading smartphone OS if their devices were sold at price parity with iPhones is deluding themselves.
Similarly, if Apple wanted to overtake Windows PC markethsare with Macs (they don't) they would be foolish not to compete on price. When you are asking the user to try something new (or new to them) and non-mainstream, "pay more for this risky new thing" isn't a very attractive proposition.
Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
It's customizing the design, not creating a custom design.
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsVie...
"Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."
You realize this doesn't make sense...right?
Samsung worked with a company called Intrinsity. They took the Cortex-A8 design, and Intrinsity made it a bit more power efficient. Samsung sells these chips, and uses them in their devices. They also sell them to Apple. Apple gets Samsung to put Apple logos on them, and refers to them as the A4. Apple bought the company called Intrinsity after all the work on the A4 was finished, nothing they've done in the pay of Apple has any impact on the A4 or Hummingbird core.
I responded to someone claiming that Intrinsity customised the chips for Apple. This isn't true. I linked to a press release that shows this.
So what am I missing?
Meh, ARM is a space where a number of companies are already in cutthroat competition and no one is going to walk in and totally change the game.
Apple's MO here is pretty clear:
(1) investigate their options thoroughly,
(2) back the best price/performance,
(3) possibly make some optimizations,
(4) then lock up the supply if possible.
...
And the results actually are pretty impressive, iPad 2 leaves every other tablet in the dust:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4605/40363.png
While getting the best battery life in the category:
44 fps / 1.30 = 33.8 fps, still ahead by anywhere from 45% to 200%.
I suppose you could give Apple 10% credit seeing how they bought that much of the company that makes them (again, after starting to use their products) but then Intel should get even more credit, because they've owned more, for longer.
Everything I've ever read about Apple's supposed optimizations is that they have to do with power efficiency.
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.
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.
Oh, and he refocused the company on its original core business, where Apotheker is moving HP away from its historical roots.
Of course, he might have been constrained by the CEO.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110711006653/en/HP-D...
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.
Startupreneurs who are looking to white-label to enterprise, STOP. dont waste your time.
A few years ago, under Mark Hurd, they bought EDS and Mercury for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive
Never heard of their software? Be glad.
Announced about a month ago...
I don't blame Apple for ignoring enterprise customers: they're usually a huge pain in the ass to deal with, and rarely have a clear idea of what they actually want. They engage suppliers just to have "a neck to choke" when things inevitably fall apart.
They aren't trying to run your enterprise for you, which is what a lot of ERP systems claim to do.
Apple is clearly going after the enterprise market on their terms, and their terms alone.
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.
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.
An unnamed source claimed something that the article itself says there's a bunch of problems with this idea and we are supposed to believe it? It was more likely a rumour that someone at Palm was putting around to try and push the price up, and the "source" believed it.
There's probably not a high-margin future for it but surely it would be an asset for a consumer company.
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.
And besides, I am not certain webOS licensing is going to go very far. We will see..
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.
I dont' doubt HP is still going to build Tablets and phones they're just likely going to be Android.
[1] Or Hiptops, depending on if you're in Magenta territory or not
>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.
That's a really hard tightrope walk for Google. The last one to try this model of both making hardware and licensing the OS was Apple during the nineties and we all know how that ended.
They need to make money from Motorola (currently it's at breakeven) to justify the purchase price for shareholders, but without pissing off the other OEMs like Samsung/HTC. I am not saying it can't be done, but it's very very hard.
Well, it meant the Danger team had to start from scratch, and the delay meant they were going up against tougher competition.
They already had an OS they were developing on, and insider reports were that scrapping it and rebuilding on top of WinCE just to satisfy the Windows everywhere mandate cost them a year of development.
WinCE might not have hurt it after it shipped, but shipping in a much different market than the one they would have hit a year earlier certainly did.
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.
"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
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?
Not likely.
I wonder what Woz thinks now. It must be a sad day for many HP engineers.
In my university days I happily used a HP calculator and scope, in addition to HPUX. Are those businesses still going strong?
I guess what I mean to say is that HP just seems like yet-another consumer electronics company. It isn't apparent to me if people have brand-loyalty to HP in the consumer segment.
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?
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
I don't use that many apps actually. Typically I just use a web browser, an ssh client (yes I actually SSH out from my phone often), and the odd solitaire card game every once in a while.
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).
The hardware is fine, and the open-source software that would surround such a release would, I'm sure, be awesome. Please, HP?
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.
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.
"We will continue webOS platform full speed! #webOS"
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes, a company has to bet they can beat the competition, or we get stuck with the same old crap, forever.
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.
"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...
"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."
Really? Seriously? Who would buy WebOS today? I'm all ears. I'm sure HP is too. Not only has it failed to gain a foothold under two separate companies, there is no successful licensed (more than $0 cost) mobile OS on the market today. You have two vertically integrated (AAPL and RIMM), and one free one (Android). Windows Phone is not as much of a failure as WebOS, but that doesn't exactly make the job easier for WebOS's next owner. It just means they have to fight even to be #3.
Come to think of it, open sourcing the whole thing could be a good move. It's the Netscape strategy all over again. It wouldn't really make HP any money, though, so they won't.
HP never really tried. $1.2B and then trashing it so quickly? That's not trying.
This was a perfect opportunity to take the time and do it right. A company that was/is good with hardware, now has a great mobile OS. It had some time to take the loss financially with success of other areas (laptops, enterprise software, etc).
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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..
i'm quite fond of that new name.
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.
Commiserations to all the people that worked on webOS.
On the other hand if Apple makes a 7" tablet I won't even have a major reason to look elsewhere.
Does anyone have insight into why Palm (pre & post HP) struggled to get the hardware right and remove glitchy behaviour from the OS?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
It's really sad.
It was totally mismanaged.
I was thinking about the Pre3.. Now I'm stuck with the Android or switching carriers for an iPhone. Neither are pleasing choices.
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.