HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU | Hacker News Reader

HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU

precentral.net

27 pointsm_st19 comments

As a Touchpad and Pre3 user, I can honestly say that these guys done a great job in delivering these devices (I love them both, yes I am a long-suffering webOS fanboy), and this is a terrible reward for all of their hard work. Wish them all well in their post-HP lives.

Unfortunately, "hard work" is not something that inherently deserves a reward (or is it its own reward?) in the business world. You can work really hard on the wrong thing. I hope the developers were compensated well for putting out a good product, but I wouldn't associate their getting laid off with how hard they worked, but that the company miscalculated.

I agree that you can work really hard on the wrong thing, but in my opinion the Pre3 and the Touchpad are the right thing (and I'm not alone in this). The reasons why they didn't sell (in my opinion) are that they were priced wrong on the initial release, the marketing was poor to non-existent (in the case of Europe for example, where there was no marketing), and finally they were just not given enough of a chance (who cancels a new device about a month after it is released? And in the case of the Pre3 it was never released outside of Europe...).

All of these things are the fault of strategic management at HP, not the hardware engineers who are losing their jobs.

The Pre3 and the Touchpad are the right thing? They may have been the right thing in HP/Palm's eyes at the time, but they're dead now. Flatlined. Time to let go.

I hope the hardware engineers land on their feet at other companies, but I have a hard time believing for a moment that 525 folks comprised the Hardware division alone and nobody else was caught up in this. Developer Relations and webOS Development seems to have escaped the axe this time, but if I were working there I'd be looking over my shoulder more than a couple times a day.

Unless webOS gets a new lease on life through either a coherent strategy or new hardware licensees (preferably both) VERY soon, it's dead. They had one massive dry spell during the transition to HP that killed what market share and most of the developer mindshare they had; they're not going to make it through another one and have both consumers and developers give it yet another chance. All but the most dedicated webOS developers have already left as it is.

My prediction: Once the CM7 (Android Gingerbread) port hits, most of the people who bought the Touchpad at firesale will evaporate away from webOS along with whatever developer revenue was left to be had, dual-boot or not. webOS will end up an embedded OS for menu-driven appliances and other applications of their ilk, but never see another non-enterprise consumer mobile device again.

"and this is a terrible reward for all of their hard work."

Don't cry for them too hard, Argentina. I know one of them, they have a severence coming which I believe was part of the deal when HP bought them - cancel Palm/WebOS, lay us off, and we get paid. It'll buy a lot of them time to think about what's next and hopefully start some cool new startups that inherit what they've learned and done over the years.

I can really feel for the fans of webOS. I was a user and big fan of BeOS when it was dying and it totally sucked.

And then Palm acquired BeOS IP in 2001 for $11 million.

And did nothing with it! They eventually sold the IP to an asian company that, as far as I know, also did nothing with it.

That's why I fear for WebOS and its future. It seems like once an operating system is sold to another company, it often just dies. The one success story that comes to my mind is Nextstep, which became Mac OS X, but I think that its success has more to do with Steve Jobs than anything.

webOS software devs are still there. https://twitter.com/#!/SirKneeland/status/115994758777815041

Yes, but for how long? If I was there and saw one side of the team cut, I'd start polishing my CV. Maybe HP moves the software people around so that they never get "cut", but honestly I don't think there's much hope for anyone still working on that platform.

HP's stock is at its lowest point in the last 5 years. I'm not sure if it can afford to keep those Palm people around.

I am a contractor at HP in Roseville. While we are not associated with the WebOS team, there have been talks here about layoffs. I work on the HP Networking/Procurve team. We have been told that our team is being integrated with HPIT, but the problem with that is the HPIT team is on the east coast, so that means the chances of even the employees keeping their jobs is slim. All of us contractors have been warned that our contract will most likely end at the end of October. While I don't know for sure, I would guess that the WebOS team will be folded into some other HPIT team if they are willing to relocate.

Isn't that like half of Palm? This sucks. The Apothekerlypse continues.

must be true, their stock is rising http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:HPQ

Look at HPQ two years from now, when it has no product to sell.

I don't buy their software strategy. Neither does the market.

http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

See when Dell and HP start to diverge? Guess what happened on August 18th.

great graph

What do /did these 525 people do exactly, if they weren't developers or developer relations? Middle managers?

Hardware.

Which leads you to wonder...525 people were assigned to hardware development? Really?

Buy and destroy, just like yahoo.

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