What now for webOS?
So the rather strange decision by HP to wash its hands of PCs and mobile before it had even come up with the best way to liquidate them is justified as paving the way for all possible avenues to be pursued. Now that it's all out in the open HP can talk to potential partners or acquirers without having to be surreptitious for fear of pesky journalists hearing about it and jumping to conclusions.
I won't dwell in the PC side of things, but clearly the other big PC players are the most obvious potential buyers. Dell seems more interested in B2B these days and Acer has more pressing matters to attend to, so that leaves Lenovo, Samsung and Apple as those who could most afford such a purchase and I think we can rule out the latter - that's just not Apple's style.
WebOS presents an intriguing proposition. The reason HP bought it is because mobile is so huge, and that's more apparent than ever now. The Googorola deal shows how exposed smartphone OEMs who don't have their own devices are. And you can be sure Samsung, HTC, etc would love to have a further alternative after Android and WP7.
But it's not as simple as, say, LG buying webOS and then saying ‘up yours' to Google and Microsoft, because it would inheret the same problem HP had been unable to solve: the developer Catch 22. Having said that, an established phone giant would offer webOS far greater retail exposure than Palm or HP could ever manage, but it would still be a hell of a high-risk strategy.
That risk would be diminished by merely licensing webOS from HP, rather than buying it, but that doesn't solve the problem of not owning your own platform and the limited control that entails. It's also by no means guaranteed that HP would continue to invest sufficiently in webOS to make it competitive.
So I think the most likely acquisition - and it probably won't be very expensive - will be by another tech giant. Apple and Google won't touch it - and probably wouldn't be allowed to by competition authorities anyway - although there might be a juicy patent angle to explore. Microsoft might be tempted, just to remove a competitor, but RIM has already committed to QNX.
In the mobile platform space that only really leaves one other: Intel. The last we heard it was still determined to make a go of MeeGo, and webOS is also Linux-based, so maybe it could combine the two and then offer it for free to encourage OEMs to give its mobile chips a go.
Another potential suitor being talked-about is Facebook. Counter-intuitive though it might seem, the same basic principle of owning your own mobile platform applies, and this would allow it to make a Facebook Phone. Given Facebook's current ubiquity on mobile devices, I can't see where the latent demand for such a thing is, but Facebook may consider a few hundred million dollars to be a small price to pay in order to find out.
For HP this represents a complete failure in mobile, but at least it's facing up to it. The Palm acquisition was, in part, designed to lessen HP's dependence on Microsoft, and it will now have some bridges to rebuild there. It would be a shame to see webOS, which generally gets nice reviews, disappear entirely, but if HP couldn't make it work, who can?
