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HP announced Friday that its WebOS mobile platform would be made open source. It's a major decision that essentially sends the software to a slow, quiet death.
The decision came during an all-hands meeting on Friday morning -- this after months of speculation that the platform's life was hanging in the balance. The goal, says HP, is to accelerate the development of webOS by putting it in the hands of as many open source enthusiasts as possible.
“WebOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable,” said Meg Whitman, the newly crowned president of HP. “By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.”
Her message sounds rosy, but open-sourcing the platform is like putting a horse out to pasture. Instead of maintaining its proprietary hold on the private software code, the company is giving it away to the masses, a signal that HP will be ramping down platform development.
“HP’s decision is a graceful exit to a $1.2 billion dollar fiasco,” said Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman-Epps in an interview. "It’s like giving an outfit you don’t wear anymore to charity, rather than taking it to the dump."
WebOS had a rocky history even before HP purchased Palm, its original developer, in 2010. After a disastrous series of webOS device launches via the Pre and Pixie smartphones, Palm's marketshare was dangerously low compared to that of RIM, Google and Apple. When HP acquired Palm last year, it seemed that the fledgling operating system might stand a fighting chance in the platform wars. After all, taking a vertical integration tack, where a single company owns both the software and hardware of a single platform, has worked wonders for Apple and RIM.
But the launch of HP/Palm's comeback devices -- the TouchPad tablet and the Veer smartphone -- came with a bang, and ended with a fizzle. Just a month and a half after releasing the TouchPad to the world, HP discontinued all hardware development, and was stuck with hundreds of thousands of unsold inventory. The cost to the company was in the billions.
Since then, the fate of webOS has hung in the balance. Possibilities for the wayward OS could have included selling the software to RIM -- a company whose BlackBerry OS is beginning to look dated -- or selling the OS and its ample platform portfolio to any number of companies looking for more intellectual property holdings.
So what happened to these two options? Well, the choice to open-source the platform could stem from shopping the OS around and coming back empty-handed.
It's unclear what will happen to the current HP teams responsible for webOS, though the company told Rotman-Epps that a small team will be retained to work on platform development. It's also possible that HP could shift at least some of its resources to backing another viable operating system.
"HP has said they will be supporting Windows 8," Rotman-Epps said, "but I don’t know that they’ll move an entire team over to it. I’m sure some will be laid off."
It's an unfortunate ending to a promising operating system, one that nearly every technology critic has deemed "great software" running on "terrible hardware." But the original team that developed webOS -- Matias Duarte, who is now at Google, Peter Skillman, who currently designs for Nokia, and Mike Abbott, now a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins -- have all moved on.
And like them, so shall we.
