I hope webOS doesn't end up in HP's hands after all this
Yesterday, newly-hired HP CEO Meg Whitman held a meeting to discuss the future of webOS, a pretty hefty investment of $1.2 billion back on April 28th of 2010. She talked about plenty of things, like how she and her team have been trying to figure out what the best thing to do for the software that HP thinks is great.
For us tech geeks, the obvious decision was to keep webOS and make some killer hardware to compete with Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Unfortunately, the company couldn't do that.
The TouchPad and the Veer were the only two products to be released from the marriage of HP and Palm, and both of them suffered from build quality issues and various software kinks.
The fact that HP doesn't know what to do with webOS, which could potentially have an incredible future, along with the production issues that accompanied the stuff that was released, makes me feel that HP is not worthy of holding the software under its roof. There are too many second guesses, too much playing around, and too much waiting for the webOS faithful.
I'm being dead serious when I say that HP would be better off getting any money for webOS at all, and giving it to a company who knows how to produce things. Let's take a look at a few of those examples below, shall we?
HTC might be an interested buyer, although my personal belief is that it's a little too invested into Android and Windows Phone 7 to viably use another operating system. Honestly, though, HTC does one of the best jobs of revamping GUIs and making them run fantastically and look beautiful. Sense is my favorite manufacturer skin by a long shot, so I think webOS would look even better with some of those styling cues.
Samsung is another option, although its CEO bluntly denied the rumors of the software coming to any Galaxy S II device. Still, companies say things all the time, so there's still a possibility that we could see something along the lines of that scenario happen at some point in the future.
RIM could make a purchase, as well, but I think it would be best if we keep that company out of the equation. RIM has about as many problems as HP right now, so let's just keep that thought out of our minds.
Basically, the point I'm trying to get across here is that there are plenty of options for webOS at this point. It's not dead. If HP keeps it, then they better darn well do a good job with hardware and rolling out software updates and bug fixes. If not, then I hope with all my heart that somebody with some talent can take it away.
