The OEM doth protest too much, methinks
We live in cynical times and when a company chooses to publicly deny it's going to do something, that often merely serves to reinforce a feeling to the contrary.
As soon as HP announced it was going to stop throwing good money after bad, and capitulate in the mobile device market, the speculation began about who might buy it. Many companies, with Google springing most prominently to mind, would be interested in the patents, but the hope is that the eventual acquirer will also be interested in investing in the platform.
Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft already have their own platforms, so speculation has focused on other handset-makers - especially Android ones who may be perturbed by Google's planned acquisition of Motorola. By far the biggest of the companies that make Android phones is Samsung, so it stands to reason that speculation has focused on the Korean giant.
And the speculation hasn't been restricted to webOS. HP also said it was considering flogging its entire PC operation, and once more attention has focused on Samsung as one of the few PC OEMs that could afford an acquisition that would presumably bundle the two properties into a great big bundle of consumer tech goodness.
None of that speculation has been substantiated by even anonymous sources, to the best of our knowledge, but a week ago Samsung still felt compelled to issue a brief statement saying it wasn't interested in buying HP's PC business. It then followed-up with an even more strident rebuttal, reported on by All Things D, from Samsung CEO and Geosung Choi, which went as follows.
"To put to rest any speculation on this issue, I would like to definitively state that Samsung Electronics will not acquire Hewlett-Packard's PC business. HP is the global leader in the PC business with sales of 40 million units last year, while Samsung is an emerging player in the category and sold about 10 million units in 2010. Based on the significant disparity in scale with Samsung's own PC business and the complete lack of synergies, it would be both infeasible and imprudent to even consider such an acquisition."
To be honest that's pretty categorical. If Samsung went and bought HP's PSG that statement would be quite rightly thrown back in Choi's face. But neither statement addressed webOS, which definitely leaves that possibility open. Samsung aspires to be like Apple - too much for the latter's liking - and owning its own platform would be a big step in that direction. So such an acquisition would, on that basis, make sense.
Which is presumably why those masters of thinly-sourced tech rumour-mongering at Digitimes are saying Samsung is ‘reportedly considering buying webOS', without revealing which report they're referring to. They then shift the goalposts - in a four-paragraph story that is credited to three separate writers - and say the rumour originates from ‘notebook players', whatever that means.
Regardless, this story is being re-reported far and wide, not least by the All Things D, as a distinct possibility. To us this is an indication that a lot of people think a Samsung acquisition of webOS - which it could presumably have done a year ago if it wanted to - is quite likely, but that nobody's got any sources giving them anything concrete. Any apparent corroboration of this hunch, no matter how tenuous, is therefore being jumped on.
