If you landed here via the homepage, you would have heard it by now: HP Is done with its stint with WebOS / Palm. Last year when HP picked up Palm for $1.2 billion, it raised a hope and as well as fear amongst us. The potential was immense, but then HP’s history with smartphones was anything but encouraging. If you see the amount Google is spending to get hold of Motorola, you would realise that Palm was a tiny company. Ten times smaller than what Google spent on Motorola. Jon Rubinstein stayed and raised hopes. We trusted HP to go aggressive with webOS and do a turnaround. The OS had considerable potential, positive reviews and what we heard from HP was “we didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business” What? You talked of getting webOS on printers, desktops and where not. We took that as time buying techniques in good faith. HP needed time to bake WebOS and rollout some excellent products, but looking back, it was ‘confusion’.
Palm was out with the WebOS much before Windows Phone 7 or MeeGo made any news. WebOS was the first to give a refreshing UI, shifting away from the similar approach iOS and Android have taken. And yet, it ends up in the dead-pool? And that too after being acquired by a giant like HP?
Before getting out a decent smartphone, you pushed a beta product as ‘TouchPad‘. That’s what I feared exactly a year back. Palm got a year or perhaps less within HP to deliver a tablet, smartphone and even deal with the long term confusion with the WebOS on printers / desktop talk and even licensing. What Palm needed was a hungry and aggressive partner, not a clumsy behemoth like HP.
News that pours in today is of HP spinning off the PC business. They clearly don’t want to be in a commoditised business and deal with razor thin margins. But, WebOS products were the window of hope. An optimistic and opportunistic entrepreneur would have seen so much potential there.
Instead, what we hear from HP is “To make this investment a financial success would require significant investments over the next one to two years, creating a risk without clear returns” (source TIMN). So HP actually expected to do business without taking risks? In a business division that would give multi-billions in sales, you expected to be done with investing $1.2 billion for acquisition?
Dear HP, Palm was not a magic wand to turnaround your smartphone dreams. WebOS was not a magic carpet that would let you fly with your printers, desktops and tablets. If the venture failed, accept it. Accept that, you attempted, and it didn’t work. Don’t say that ‘it didn’t meet internal targets’. You barely gave a year to it, and that too we feel was half-hearted. Your gestures to go for the 3rd spot in the mobile game was not a bold declaration but a search for exit. Exit from a game that you never truly played.
