My thoughts on the HP WebOS debacle

There has been so much talk surrounding HP’s handling of the WebOS product and it surely did not start recently with their decision to pretty much abandon the product line but instead for Palm device owners the way HP has handled the product since its acquisition of Palm has been borderline treasonous.

Lately, I have noticed calls from some writers for HP to reverse their decision and save WebOS while others hope that HP will just sell or license the platform to a manufacturer that is capable of making good mobile devices such as Samsung.

All in all I think the best thing for HP is to let the product go either by licensing it out or selling it off. I remember at OSCON this year seeing HP marketing execs discreetly handing out TouchPads to certain people and one of the people I happened to know so I asked what the deal was and she indicated they offered her one and she told them that she had a iPad and likely wouldn’t even use it.

It seems HP’s biggest issue is not lack of innovation or good products but instead poor marketing and lack of community and the inability to give a product enough nourishment.

If you recall back in February HP’s SVP of WebOS  Jon Rubinstein announced that HP would not release WebOS 2.x to early devices as had been promised but he promised that upon launch of the first 2.x devices that HP would “do something special” for the early device owners which of course was never honored and resulted in some dissent in the WebOS community and ultimately Rubinstein was booted from that SVP spot.