HP's Whitman Will Decide webOS's Future Within 2 Weeks
posted Friday Dec 2, 2011 by Scott Ertz
It is always a little bitter-sweet to write one of these articles. As a person who owns 3 webOS devices, including a launch Palm Pre, plus a PLuGHiTz Live! app, the future of the OS is very interesting to me. Since HP first purchased Palm for $1.2 billion, the road has been rocky for webOS, with several rumors that HP might retire the platform. When the hardware division was closed and the fire sale started, it looked like the end. Then, HP fired their CEO and things looked brighter. Now, that CEO has a decision to make, and she says she will make it soon.
In fact, HP CEO Meg Whitman has said that the decision will be made within 2 weeks as to what the future of Palm/HP's highly reviewed and poorly sold platform, and the devices that will or will not run it. The decision is a difficult one; she has to weigh the initial cost of $1.2 billion against the sales of devices and, of course, the possibly value of selling the platform. There have been plenty of rumors of interest from outside, including Facebook and Amazon, both of whom want hardware but don't want to offer Android on said devices. We know that HP will release Windows 8 tablets after that platform goes live, but HP wouldn't be the first company to offer multiple platforms. Samsung currently offers phones with Android, Windows Phone 7 and their own proprietary OS.
So, the constant stream of rumors and conjecture are almost at an end. No matter which way it goes, I think everyone will be happy to be able to stop talking about it.
