For a company that took a great mobile OS like webOS and let it whiter and die, HP sure has a lot to say about mobile OS strategy. When speaking at HP’s global partner summit in Las Vegas, CEO Meg Whitman told attendees that Google’s acquisition of Motorola would cause Android to move from an open source platform to a closed one like iOS.
This, of course, contrasts with webOS which is now open source and being release piecemeal by HP to the developer community. Whitman believes there is room for another major OS and said HP’s decision to open source webOS could take “three to four years to play out.”
In all fairness, Whitman is not the first one to echo this negative sentiment about Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Even casual observers wonder how Google will take advantage of Motorola’s hardware assets and not alienate its other hardware partners. If Google favors Motorola over its vendors like HTC and Samsung, then it risks losing these partners to another mobile OS like Windows Phone. Android is already facing mounting pressure from patent disputes, and a mass exodus of its vendors would cripple the mobile OS and send its market share into a death spiral.
[Via Channel EMEA]