Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Hold on, Palm’s operating system, being split into two different branches of the company – hardware and software – all so that it should be easier for the parent company to licence the OS to other manufacturers and thus create a thriving ecosystem of devices. Where have I heard that before? Oh yes… Palm, Inc.
Suddenly the HP tablets are everywhere; an instant user base has sprung up, dwarfing the base of any other tablet than the iPad. HP seems to be wavering on the hard line that the tablet business was done with. Yet with this supposed fire sale, HP has done what no other non-Apple tab let vendor has been able to accomplish; jump start the sales and market for a new tablet device and operating system. The Coca-Cola Company didn’t plan New Coke as a master plan to boost market share, Coca Cola didn’t announce they were stopping sugary water for everyone, and they
So you have a competent smartphone operating system, an engineering team that, with the right inducement, could stay with the OS, and a rather fluid market looking for options. What will HP do with WebOS next? Let’s have some pointless speculative fun over the next few paragraphs. Facebook buys the whole operation. Probably a long shot, and built on the speculation that Zuckerberg and co. are working on a Facebook phone. They certainly have some raw data (via Three in the UK), and acquiring a bundle of software engineers, an OS that is built on HTML5 and web technologies, with (you assume)
HP’s shakedown of WebOS, and the potential disaster of Google/Motorola shows that nothing stays still in the mobile market. Given the focus on apps, making sure you have the developer mindshare is supremely important. it’;s one of the things WebOS nearly got right. Anyway, in a world where Apple is the defacto chocie, and Android is the “better have the other side of the coin” arguably there is just one more space in the brain. The question now is if this will be Windows Phone, RIM, Bada, Series 40, Meego, or something else. Microsoft really want it to be them, and
Follow through the chain of thought here. HP buy up a promising mobile operating system from a small company with "Palm" in their name. They get ready to use it in a device or two, but are also ready to licence it to other manufacturers. Other handset manufacturers think this is nice, but would rather HP don’t know what they had planned for a new product (eg Samsung. Speculation but does that sounds a fun idea?). So HP set up a chinese wall between the WebOS software engineers and the WebOS hardware engineers. Which becomes two separate departments. Which work
PalmOS is dead. That’s Ed Colligan’s assertion, and given he’s Da Man at Palm, I think we can call that case closed (yes Centro’s will still be sold, but no new models. From here on in you can go Windows Mobile or webOS – so make sure you hold the shift key down on the right letters. To be honest this doesn’t surprise me. If handspring had bit the bullet when it was formed all those years ago and started with a blank page rather than licence PalmOS back from 3com, they wouldn’t have hit the dead end they did
