What HP Should Do With WebOS?

It would mean they would lose control, and maintaining control while slowly failing is usually preferable to corporate managers than is succeeding while having less control.

> ...and maintaining control while slowly failing is usually preferable to corporate managers...

Especially at HP, which has been conducting a case study in failure for the past 20 years now.

Lots of great ideas seem to get floated at HP. Most of them never make it out the door, and the few that do are quickly abandoned.

It's not even clear that WebOS failed:

Charlie Demerjian wrote: Sources in sunny California are saying that the Palm/WebOS tablets were actually not selling badly, and in fact were selling quite well. Given the acceptable sales, and the short life span, it makes you really wonder why the line was canceled.

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/08/19/insiders-say-there-is-one-company-looking-at-the-hp-pc-line/

...so, did they jump, or were they pushed, perhaps by Kinslayer Microsoft, who still enjoys a monopoly on their desktops and notebooks? That'd be one good reason to dump the PC line: to remove vulnerability to "knife the baby*" coercion.

*http://www.businessweek.com/microsoft/updates/up81105b.htm

Shame they exited the PC business all my laptops have been HP, they made great laptops and was about to buy another one but will now move over to Acer now.

As to WebOS every review I read said they were slow whether that was down to the OS or underpowered hardware doesnt matter as the customer doesnt give a d@mn where the fault lies so im not suprised they had low sales.

But im thinking HP is in a bad way if they had to jump ship on WebOS so quickly and I think their exit from the PC business is a bit risky as well if Lenovo marketing protestations and financials are anything to go by as say they are doing pretty well out of the PC business even though margins are slim, and their machines though good are not a patch on HP.

What I can say is that there are far to many small device OS's out there and really only space for about 2 to survive and Android and Apple pretty much have that sewn up. If anything else takes off then I would be very suprised, I know i didnt mention Microsoft mostly because im not convinced their OS is going anywhere and that Nokia made a very bad move which their shareholders should already be seriously questioning.

Looks like Hewlett-Packard may go the way of Packard Bell.

Let's call it the "Hewlett-Packard Bell Graveyard", where poorly managed companies go to wither away into irrelevance.

Hewlett-Packard And The Dearthly Hollow (in this sense, without the Bleach-crossover reference to the CEO)