View From Above » WebOS

HP Leaves webOS Wounded, Not Even Dead

Ron Miller — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:45:19 +0000

But they wind up wounded,
Not even dead
Tonight In Jungle Land
~Bruce Springsteen, Jungle Land

HP didn’t take an axe to webOS on Friday when it announced it was releasing webOS to open source. Instead, it’s killing it by degrees by releasing it to a community without any real hardware company backing and few prospects of finding any.

Unless, HP decides to build devices running webOS, it’s hard to imagine anyone else will either, especially after HP killed any positive webOS vibes with its on again/off again/on again strategy.

Just last week, Adobe announced it was open sourcing Flex, its way of kicking their Flash programming environment to the curb, leaving it in the hands of the community to support from this point forth. As one commenter pointed out on dZone, it was less cruel than killing it altogether, but wasn’t exactly an optimal situation.

webOS is the next technology to be open sourced. As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote on ZDNet, there are precious few details about how this is supposed to work. We only know that it’s going to be open source in some form.

But Lance Ulanoff writing on Mashable reports that his sources indicate (these are unamed) that this will be a tightly controlled open source implementation, more like Red Hat Linux than Android with its many forks.

But to what end really? Vaughan-Nichols optimistically pointed to manufacturers looking for a third option — where Windows hasn’t worked (at least so far) and RIM is fading fast–that might take a look at webOS, but I can’t imagine how they can take this whole thing seriously at this point.

Let’s not forget that HP bought Palm with much promise. There was the Leo Apotecher speech about putting webOS on every device, even printers. The developer community got stoked. HP started making plans for phones and tablets, and then just as fast as they launched, they quickly pulled the plug.

That leaves HP with an OS that isn’t even running on HP devices (at least for now). So it’s open source, but what does that really buy anyone? Without a group of committed developers — and anyone who was developing for webOS is probably not feeling warm and fuzzy about it right about now- — or a big hardware manufacturer, where can this go?

Android is open source too and it’s very popular. Not to say there isn’t room for more than one open source mobile OS because I’m sure the market would be happy to have something in place to put a check on Google, but I’m having a really hard time picturing how this is going to end even reasonably well for webOS.

So we have an open source mobile operating system that with apologies to Bruce Springsteen, HP has left wounded, not even dead, and very little hope that someone is going to come along and resuscitate it. I just don’t see how this is adds up.

HP Decision to Dump webOS Still Makes No Sense

Ron Miller — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:05:27 +0000

Confusion will be my epitaph

As I crawl a cracked and broken path

If we make it we can all sit back and laugh

But I fear tomorrow we’ll be crying.

~King Crimson, Epitaph

When HP suddenly jettisoned the TouchPad and webOS a couple of weeks ago, the move shocked me because it made no sense whatsoever to dump the company’s chief mobile component. webOS and TouchPad gave HP some mobile street cred in its battle with Google, Apple and Microsoft and it gave the PC division a mobile piece it was sorely lacking.

Today, as I read about HP’s plan to spin off the PC division–which means keep it, but run it as a separate company–it makes even less sense. While the PC has a long life ahead of it, as many have written we are clearly headed into a post-PC era and this is especially true on the consumer level as smart phones and tablets replace PCs for tasks such as email, reading, playing games, watching media and so forth.

Writing on Twitter today, analyst Michael Gartenberg, criticized HP’s decision to ax the TouchPad saying:

“HP forgot the Tablet market right now is a marathon, not a sprint. It was about going the distance not speed.”

He’s right of course. HP had barely had the device on the market for 6 weeks (49 days to be exact). To just give up on it and sell off every webOS device in a cut-price fire sale makes little sense and doesn’t bode well for CEO Leo Apotheker’s leadership or vision.

Any future that doesn’t include mobile is doomed to failure in my view and revealing his plan to trash webOS devices in such a public way was simply bad business. In fact, one former HP board member was quoted in the New York Times as calling HP’s plans corporate suicide:

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is,” a former H.P. director, the venture capitalist Tom Perkins, told me this week. “It’s just astonishing.”

It’s hard to argue given the speed with which Apotheker has take a once mighty company and driven it straight down, apparently along with stock prices, which fell mightily on the day after HP announced it was giving up on the TouchPad and webOS, selling or spinning off its lucrative PC division and overpaying for Autonomy for $10 billion.

But the worst decision in my view is the one to walk away from the mobile strategy set in motion by former CEO Mark Hurd, who started this downward sprial when he was caught in scandal last summer and was forced to resign by the Board of Directors.

In fact, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is never short of bombastic opinion, likened the firing to the canning of Steve Jobs at Apple in the late 1980s. I’m not sure I would go that far, but so far it has turned out to be a horrible move, made worse by hiring a man lacking any vision whatsoever in Apotheker (much like John Sculley, the man who replaced Jobs back in the day).

If HP wants to keep its PC division as a separate company, great, but to do so without a tablet and smart phone line is a recipe for failure.

In another bizarre revelation to this twisted tale, The LA Times reported today that HP may in fact bring back the TouchPad after the company spins off the PC division.

If you’re anything like me you are completely confused at this point, because if that’s the case, the TouchPad was on the market already and there was no good reason to kill it–only to bring it back at some point.

At this point, HP has lost so much credibility in the mobile space, that trying to lure back burned developers, suppliers and dealers is going to be nearly impossible.

The mobile space is so competitive to begin with, but by making a series of perplexing decisions, HP has just made it even harder for themselves and for what appears to be no good reason that I can see.

HP’s webOS Decision Sends Shock Waves Through Developer Community

Ron Miller — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:33:00 +0000

HP shocked a good part of the mobile world last week when it announced it was pulling its fledgling tablet off the market and abandoning webOS altogether. I imagine developers and IT departments that were creating apps for webOS weren’t too pleased — to say the least

It has to leave even the most jaded IT managers wondering just who they can trust when a long-standing brand with a good reputation in the enterprise just walks away from a platform, even while it seemed to be trying to recruit folks to develop applications for it.

And while we’re at it, another major mobile story broke last week when Google bought Motorola Mobility, raising questions about just how neutral Google can be about Android when it’s selling its own phones.

Lest we forget, earlier this year Nokia suddenly dropped Symbian and MeeGo and threw its weight behind Windows Phone 7.

Mobile development is a confusing landscape under the best of circumstances, but the last week in particular, just turned it on its head. I don’t want to be over dramatic about it because it’s not as though Apple abandoned iOS or Google abandoned Android, but it’s a pretty big deal that HP walked away from webOS.

It leaves me wondering how many business models were just throw into disarray by HP’s seemingly impetuous decision. While the HP TouchPad got mixed reviews, developers reportedly really liked webOS as a development platform, even if they were cautious — and it turned out with good reason — about throwing resources at it just yet.

Box. net, an online storage and collaboration company, recently announced support across all of the major platforms including HP TouchPad. They went so far as to run a promotion with HP offering a whopping 50 GB of free storage to TouchPad buyers, good for the life of the Box account (and don’t forget it’s good across many devices and platforms).

Box could not have been pleased when HP walked away from the tablets barely 7 weeks after the July 1st launch, but Box CEO Aaron Levie chose to see it in a positive light saying, “Ironically, the short-term impact has been positive: recent TouchPad sales have driven a major spike in Box signups – 30,000 Box for TouchPad app downloads to date…”

Some speculate that webOS will rise again, but it’s impossible to say what its future is right now, and I don’t see many developers supporting it at this point, even if somebody rescues it. But Box’s Levie says, he doesn’t see this having a huge impact on emerging platforms in general. Instead, he believes it may push the adoption of a more standardized approach like HTML5.

“I doubt HP’s decision will dissuade developers from building for emerging platforms in a major way. Rather, the focus will be on speeding up and standardizing cross-platform app development – for instance, leveraging HTML5 to more efficiently bring services to all devices, like we recently did with our HTML5 mobile web app,” Levie said.

Regardless, HP’s decision had to leave developers a bit shell shocked, wondering what would happen next. Maybe Levie’s right though and it will force the industry to look at a more standardized development approach where it doesn’t matter when vendors come and go like this.

Will an HP WebOS license deal matter?

Ron Miller — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:34:10 +0000

Bloomberg reported today that HP is talking to companies about licensing its WebOS operating system. What this means, essentially is that instead of just running exclusively on HP products, it would run on other company’s products — possibly competing products — as well. Is this a good strategy for HP and does it matter?

HP certainly thinks that mobile is still in play. In a Fast Company article earlier this week, Phil McKinney, president and CTO of HP’s personal systems group had this to say about the mobile competition. “Everyone’s trying to make it seem the conclusion has been decided. We’re still in the top of the first inning.”

What would you expect him to say — that he’s giving up? Not likely. Like any good baseball manager, HP is going to keep pulling strings until the last pitch and see what happens — as they should.

Licensing WebOS could be a double-edged sword for HP though. When you look at the tablet and phone market, as of this moment, Apple and Google are clearly dominating. When it comes to the tablet, the iPad continues to blow away the field. HP gets it turn at bat on Friday when the HP Touchpad hits stores.

If the other competitors from Samsung to Motorola to RIM are any indication, HP’s prospects are not terribly bright. So far, when people buy a tablet, in overwhelming numbers they are choosing the iPad. Back in March, admittedly a life-time ago in tablet time, Apple Insider reported that 82 percent of potential tablet buyers said they would choose iPad. Those kind of numbers don’t bode well for HP, no matter what inning it is.

Licensing could end up fragmenting the tablet market even further. HP is not the first company to face this conundrum, but I’m willing to bet they are thinking that it’s better to have a larger total WebOS user system in place than it is to worry about protecting the company’s own hardware sales because the more companies building hardware running WebOS, the more developers have to pay attention.

It’s not without merit, but HP isn’t Google. It’s a hardware company first and foremost and as such it needs to sell HP branded tablets and phones. Let’s say a company like Asus licenses the WebOS technology and releases a nifty little tablet that is nicer and cheaper than the one from HP. Would the licensing money (and the fact they were spreading the WebOS love) make up for the fact that they were also possibly undercutting their own market?

It’s not easy to say. Nor is it clear how many vendors would want to run WebOS, adding yet another OS to the already murky mix. Android has the advantage of being open source and therefore free. Companies licensing WebOS would have to figure in operating system costs as they do when running Windows Phone 7. The question is can they price it attractively enough to make it worthwhile for companies to choose WebOS without making it so cheap they don’t make any money.

This is not a market for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. HP is late to the game and as such is going to have to get creative to force its way in. I’m just not sure if licensing is going to help them or hurt them.

Photo by Tom Raftery on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

HP Declares its (web)Os Independence

Ron Miller — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 10:00:05 +0000

London calling to the faraway towns
Now that war is declared-and battle come down

~The Clash, London Calling

Last week at HP CEO’s Leo Apotheker’s coming out party, he came off as a smart, competent leader with a vision for taking his organization forward, while helping us leave the whole sordid Mark Hurd affair in the rear view.

I wrote a post (HP Jumps on Cloud Bandwagon) concentrating on Apotheker’s cloud vision, but there was much more to the speech than that, chiefly a declaration of (web)OS Independence from Microsoft with a promise of webOS running on every HP consumer device (including printers).

After I wrote the piece, friend and fellow technology journalist Tom Henderson wrote me an amusing email, which for all intents and purposes told me I missed the real news, and it seems he was right.

As Henderson pointed out, Apotheker, in so many words put Microsoft on notice that that his company’s little $1.2 billion Palm purchase last year turned them from beggars to players for what amounts to enterprise pocket change. To be fair to my own analytical skills, I did recognize at the time of the purchase that this was about competing with Google, Microsoft and Apple, but I saw it as a pure mobile play when it appears to be much more than that.

As I wrote at the time: “Make no mistake though, this is all about getting the best of Microsoft, Google and Apple. And with this purchase, HP gave notice it was grabbing a place at the mobile table.”

Turns out HP had bigger fish to fry. While Apotheker made lots of noise about how Microsoft was a great partner, he let them know in no uncertain terms that HP was going to be a player in its own right with plans to put webOS on every device in the ecosystem.

The implications of this are clear. First of all, HP is no longer beholden to Redmond in any way, shape or form. What’s more, Microsoft is now a direct competitor for both customers and developers. If the vision carries through to fruition, every developer on the planet has to start paying attention to webOS, just for the numbers alone.

And that’s precisely what makes it a brilliant, if risky play. Apple has succeeded with iOS by making it impossible to ignore. HP is banking on the same strategy. You can’t ignore an OS that’s has a potential base of 100 million devices (if you believe the hyperbole).

Regardless, it’s also a strategy that leaves HP hanging out alone in the cold, cruel marketplace. Does IT want to deal with supporting yet another OS? Will general consumers want to buy PCs with an unfamiliar operating system? It’s impossible to say until we watch it play out.

But one thing is very clear, Apotheker has decided to take a stand with a bold vision for the company. If it succeeds, it’s a brilliant play. If it fails, it has exposed one of the world’s great technology companies to serious risk.

One thing’s for sure, I haven’t written about HP in months and I just wrote two successive blog posts about them. Apotheker has succeeded in getting us to talk about his company and, for that he has won the first battle. The war for hearts and minds is another matter altogether, and HP has decided to go it alone.

HP Hops on Cloud Bandwagon

Ron Miller — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:52:16 +0000

The Cloud Bandwagon

New CEO Leo Apotheker made clear in a speech yesterday that HP plans to build a new cloud business where it will offer services for developers to build and host applications in the cloud. In fact, HP is going far beyond its current mission selling hardware to competing with services like Verizon, Rackspace and Amazon in the Infrastructure as a Service business (IaaS) business.Apotheker said his company would help customers build a hybrid cloud where part of the data and hardware remains behind the firewall and part of it in the cloud, and would also provide a full range of cloud services including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS – hosted server and storage) along with Platform as a Service (Paas – a Cloud service for building applications).

HP is already well behind the competition, especially IBM and the previously mentioned pure play cloud infrastructure providers. But Apotheker addressed that saying straight out, “I don’t think we’re playing catch up with anyone, certainly not when it comes to IBM.”

Of course he can put up a brave front for the world, but it doesn’t hide the fact the HP faces an uphill battle here. As Apotheker himself pointed out, they need to build to a huge scale to make this cost effective and that means building data centers around the world. It will involve a huge capital investment and it will take time and money.

And while HP builds out its Cloud business, the other are forging ahead with theirs. There’s no way to sugar coat that.

It’s all well and good for Apotheker to recognize that he has to move his company into the Cloud to be a strategic player moving forward, but getting them there is another matter, and the speech was short on details.

In fact, Forrester analyst Frank Gillett as quoted on SiliconValley.com said the Cloud announcement left him scratching his head because of the lack of substance.

But of course Apotheker wasn’t just announcing his company’s new cloud initiative, he also took the opportunity to talk about the new line of mobile phones and tablets running WebOS that will be coming out this year. And make no mistake, there is an obvious link between its mobile vision and its cloud one.

Apotheker left no doubt that he considered WebOS a world class mobile platoform (but then what you expect him to say?) and would be running every HP device including tablets, smart phones, PCs and printers by 2012.

Much like with Microsoft, HP is a big company with a lot of money and big microphone, but it takes more than words to build this kind of business. It takes a huge commitment of internal employee resources and capital expenditures.

This from a company, which under former CEOs Carly Fiorina and the disgraced Mark Hurd, made more news sucking up to Wall Street investors with cost cut-backs and layoffs instead of innovation and investment.

It will be interesting to see if Apotheker can take HP and return it to its glory days as an innovative company that’s not afraid to invest in R&D. One thing’s clear though: It will take more than a good speech to make HP a serious cloud player.

Photo by cpeachok on Flickr Used under Creative Commons License.