HP would’ve sold webOS and Palm assets for $1.2 billion
The past several months at HP have been very confusing. HP was going to spin off its PC division, sell webOS, and (in my mind) destroy its entire business. Thankfully, new management took over in the form of Meg Whitman and things went back to normal . . . somewhat.
As you all know, HP recently announced that webOS would be made fully open source, meaning that anyone can use webOS on any device for anything. But it seems like the company only made that decision because no other company wanted to buy it; not only is webOS practically a dead operating system, but HP wanted to break even with its original Palm purchase and was asking a staggering $1.2 billion for all webOS and Palm assets.
I don't know about you, but I think the companies who were rumored to be interested certainly made a good choice by just walking away from. Among those companies were Facebook, Intel, Samsung, and even Amazon. I'm sure there are plenty of other manufacturers that were interested, too.
While it would've been awesome for HP to find a buyer that would fully pour all its resources into making webOS a viable choice for consumers again, I believe it's better that webOS will be, essentially, a developer's toy. webOS will now be able to run on virtually any device that a developer wants it to, and I'm actually quite excited to see what comes out of Palm's iPhone-killing OS next year.
webOS-equipped iPhone 4, anyone?
[VentureBeat]
