Amazon.com set to purchase webOS?
By hashrehash
Rumor has it that amazon.com is in talks with HP to acquire their failed webOS. As you may recall, HP originally purchased Palm and their mobile operating system, webOS, back in April of 2010 for a cool $1.2 billion..that's billion..with a b. Not exactly what you call money well spent when they went and dropped it like a hot rock just one year after they bought it and Palm.
Palm's webOS was highly praised by critics and reviewers alike, as well as people that actually bought phones and tablets using the OS. The mainstream users largely ignored it, instead opting for more popular brands such as iOS and Android. Palm's webOS' downfall may have been largely in part due to those creepy "new age" ads they seemed so persistent to air. It was in most ways superior to both iOS and Android , just not widely accepted, so HP bought a floundering Palm and tried their hand at it...with the exact same result.
When HP found that they could not entice the public enough with their revamp of the operating system, they quickly cancelled it and dropped the prices all of their tablets and phones running webOS to a ridiculously cheap $99. Needless to say, they flew off shelves and sold out on HP's website. Demand for these items is now running high and HP may find that the fire-sale price-point is the price that they could sell it at and give Apple's iPad a serious run for it's money.
Hopefully Amazon can do something great with it.
Comments
Exactly. If HP had been more of a competitor in the market and actually PROMOTED webOS, they may have had a fighting chance. In my personal opinion, HP did not try hard enough with webOS. It's a great operating system, but was SERIOUSLY underused and as you mentioned, it was put in subpar hardware, so it didn't really get a chance to shine.
I'm sure that Amazon can tweak it and make it work for them. If Amazon gets into the cell phone business they would have one of the best OSes around.
Keeping my fingers crossed.
Also bear in mind that Jon Rubenstein, the creator of the iPod, the "mover and shaker" that helped bring Apple back to greatness as Steve Jobs put it, was brought in to Palm to help breathe new life into it with WebOS. They didn't really give him the resources he needed to bring WebOS to the forefront like it should have been, Amazon does. That said, I think that one of the reasons Amazon wants to purchase WebOS is that Jon is a member of the Amazon board of directors and he probably started pushing Amazon towards it, for good reason I image. WebOS (as it is right now) would be brilliantly put to use in a reader/tablet like the kindle series in my humble opinion.
Watcher07 7 months ago
With how badly HP bungled WebOS and how they've gone through what, 3 CEO's in a little more than a year, I think Amazon has a real shot of at least doing "on par" with what HP accomplished. HP's subpar hardware attached to WebOS was what really killed it. WebOS is a brilliant example of quick and easy multitasking. Matias Duarte (the brain behind the WebOS card system) has been working for Google since about May of last year.
He came in as Android Honeycomb neared completion and got to really start putting his ideas into practice with Ice Cream Sandwich. Google really, really needs help with their multitasking in Android. But if Amazon does acquire the Palm portion of HP, I'd fully expect to see some pretty amazing Kindles with cards, which seems incredibly fitting.