Meg Whitman, the new CEO of HP, took some time for a conference call today and of course we were interested to see if WebOS came up at all. Well, it did but not in the way we were hoping. Whitman made but one comment about the failed mobile operating system that only saw real success when HP decided to drop the price of its tablet to $99, and it’s about as vague as it can get.
We continue to explore options to maximize the value of webOS software.
The comment doesn’t say anything that would make someone believe that the mobile operating system will rise from the digital grave but anything is a possibility at this point with Whitman in the CEO chair. While Palm wasn’t doing much with WebOS, it seems as if any real possibility that the OS would ever grow legs was thrown out the window when HP decided to scoop up the Centro maker.
WebOS had potential at some point and that was when the Palm Pre was first launched. Being the only aesthetically comparable mobile OS to iOS, with Android nothing but an, hardly optimized OS that seemed that it would never grow into what it is today. Unfortunately, Palm’s Pre successor, the Pixi, seemed to be an after thought when it debuted and the Plus versions of the two devices didn’t seem to cause any sort of ruckus in the mobile industry.
Whitman’s comment, or lack thereof, signals that HP is either really putting WebOS down or has gone back to the drawing board and isn’t ready to announce anything right now. Yeah, it sounds a bit hopeful to think that HP has been cooking something up this entire time and the liquidation of its tablets was done just to fool the public, but who knows what’s going to the OS at this point.
I think we should just listen to Marin when he says, ” let WebOS die already.”