HP to decide on WebOS in the coming two weeks

After having brutally cancelled their mobile strategy built around WebOS, HP has still been thinking about possibilities available to them to save part of their investment in the acquisition of Palm. The future of WebOS could be announced by mid-December.

After having acquired Palm for more than 1 billion dollars – recovering the WebOS platform on which they were planning to build a smartphone and tablet strategy, HP surprised everyone (even their internal teams) by announcing in August that they were dropping the platform from their mobile strategy.

This initiative was led by Leo Apotheker, CEO of HP in his aim of completely changing the group’s direction, although he was only in the role for 11 months. Between this decision and the possibility of selling off the PC division, the ex-CEO of the group created a crisis of confidence which ended up costing him his job with the company’s share price dropping in record time.


The future of WebOS is still unknown
Replaced by Meg Whitman, the effects of August’s strategies are starting to be felt. While the incoming CEO maintained some of the previous projects, she also wound back others while continuing to evaluate the possibilities for WebOS.

HP won’t be completely abandoning the mobile field, but their big return won’t come about before the release of Windows 8 tablets. Using WebOS in new mobile products remains a possibility, but the platform will mostly be used as a gateway to other HP products, like printers, with this facilitating connectivity and interactions.

The other possibility is to give up on WebOS. Numerous potential candidates have been put forward for such an acquisition, like Samsung, HTC, and even Facebook and Amazon, although these are unconfirmed rumours. When interviewed by le Figaro, Meg Whitman indicated that a decision would be made in the next two weeks, although she did recognise the importance and interest in having their own OS.