What’s HP’s webOS announcement of wed09feb11was all about

Image courtesy of jannoon028 via freedigitalphotos.net

Image courtesy of jannoon028 via freedigitalphotos.net.

In most of the press the story is big laggard releases a couple mobiles and a me too tablet.

…hmmm…let’s rewind to 2 years ago.

John Rubenstein of Palm, a company that is regarded as firmly on the ropes, steals the show with webOS.  It is conceptually ahead of everything else in the mobile market.  Cynics wonder if Palm has enough in the piggy bank to do the idea justice.  Sadly, they didn’t.  They did not have the money to build the slick hardware, to promote their store, and convince the mobile operators. They were full of clever ideas, and it was the converse of the HTC HD2, it was nice software, shame about the hardware.

So the HTC HD2, Microsoft, the world’s leading OS company, the once great gorilla, who has dementia, and is quietly mumbling about past glories, and dribbling instead of beating its chest and hurling chairs across the room.

Now if you are HP, that must be a bit worrying, if the supplier of your software has gone ga-ga.  What’s worse there are some new games in town:

Apps… you do not have to run a computer any more, you don’t have to divine what the tangled, creative egos of Microsofts’ programmers have tried to do.  Watching them trying to do “an Apple” with the same horror that my daughter would watch me with if I tried to dance at a school disco. Apple says, “don’t do the complicated stuff, welcome to our curated pleasure park”.

Cloud…people do not want the hassle or cost of running their own infrastructure, put it on the cloud, and don’t look too hard at SLA’s etc, because surely all these big clever people will always get it right.  The truth is that they will probably do it better than most people.

So HP loses patience, and buys the company that can deliver a new OS that can give them a future, hopefully the future.  It’s a future where all your gadgets work together with the same interface.  Boy their walled garden will make their overpriced printer ink seem trivial, but the flowers are pretty, and the paths are smooth.

It’s more than a couple of phones and a tablet, one of the biggest computer companies in the world is looking for a future without Microsoft.  Why share when you can have it all?

Disclaimer: I sold my Apple shares in Jan, a couple of days before Steve J’s medical leave was announced, and am currently hoping my RIM stock will recover with the playbook launch.

No comments

Leave a Reply