HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight.<p>Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico. Palm also has an extensive patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon.<p>However, the real prize is WebOS. I just got back from Palm's Developer Day, and their technology stack for their next OS version is pretty damn neat. It's a high performance event-driven javascript architecture on the back end, with WebKit on the front, all programmed through a Rails-ish MVC model. As a web developer, it looks shockingly easy to program for.<p>Of course, if you want to program the phone in raw C/C++ and SDL, you can do that too. It's incredibly flexible.<p>What Palm has been lacking is cash and time. The WebOS development stack won't be fully built out until Fall, and they haven't had the resources to push new phone models out as quickly as they need. This deal gives Palm much needed juice, and gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple.<p>If HP is smart, they'll start tossing WebOS on tablets as soon as they can. I'd buy an HP slate with WebOS in a heartbeat.
Dear HP:<p>Please don't mess this up.<p>You're a storied pioneer in tech, but you got massive and lost your sense of direction. You're about to acquire something of a microcosm of yourself—a company that pioneered an industry but lost its way as it grew.<p>The difference is that your new acquisition rediscovered its sense of curiosity and turned itself around, too late to save itself, but brilliantly so nonetheless. You can learn from this. Your size has protected you from Palm's fate, but you were slowly headed down the same path, despite even your well-intentioned yet insufficiently-pursued experiments with things like TouchSmart.<p>While this is a new beginning for Palm, it's also a new beginning for you. What's your tagline again? Ah, yes: <i>Invent.</i> There's never been a better time to make good on it.
I don't think that HP has a clear purpose for making this purchase. They held a conference call on the acquisition, which is available on their webpage, along with a transcript:<p><a href="http://www.hp.com/investor/webcast" rel="nofollow">http://www.hp.com/investor/webcast</a><p>The first questioner wanted to know why HP didn't just build Android devices. HP didn't have a compelling response. They just mumbled something about "early stage market" and making webOS "more compelling". Oddly, HP then mentioned that they are still a strategic partner with Microsoft.
According to the press release, Palm shareholders get $5.70/share. The stock is above $5.90/share in after-hours trading. Is there some reason for this? Is this an arbitrage opportunity (assuming you could get shares to borrow)?
Wow. I just bought a Pre a month ago. At least they'll continue to be a going concern (and able to provide me with support ;) I was hoping Palm would be able to make it independently somehow, though.<p>This would be an awesome thing if WebOS ended up on the HP Slate.
Well, this is great.<p>I love my Apple gear, and I'm going to stay that way as long as they keep making well-designed (minimalistic externally) stuff.<p>But with the Palm acquisition, HP will be able to do just what Apple is doing. And that's great - integration between software and hardware makes my life (as a user) so much easier.<p>The main question I have is: will they have any taste? The HP slate has a big white HP logo on the user-facing side, which will keep me from buying one no matter what else it might do. (I don't want to be distracted when I'm using a tablet.)
Not sure what the industry analysis of this will be, but I like the idea of HP having its own platform to present to the world.<p>It reminds me of the 80s where the was lots of diversity in the platforms. The good news here is WebOS apps are mostly built on web standards so we have the best of both worlds.
"Palm’s unparalleled webOS platform"<p>Question: is Palm's web os platform really unparalleled? Or is it quickly falling behind the race that is now dominated by iPhone and android?
This is very surprising. I'd speculated that Sony or RIM would consider buying them once HTC fell out of favor. Sony seemed to be a good fit from a capacity to deliver a high quality product, plus they have ability, much like Apple, to sell stuff at a premium.<p>RIM seemed less likely but given their need for a new phone OS, it seemed like a pretty easy fit. Corporate culture might have been a factor against them doing this deal, hard to say.<p>HP's not the sort of company that can enter a new market like this and turn it on its ear, but maybe I'm wrong. They did have the foresight to buy DEC Alpha, which seemed like a great fit, but then they did nothing with it.<p>Here's hoping for the best.
I hope HP gets WebOS to be a big enough player to mean great things for innovation in the mobile device space going forward. Gotta love competition as a consumer!
<joke>I guess HP figured out that when print media dies, it can't sell as many cartridges and figured it would tow along a sinking boat to its tanker ship. </joke><p>Whatever the case may be, HP needs to put blinders on Palm. Palm needs to ultra focus on one good phone. How did they forget that they used to focus so well on the Treos that Blackberry seemed pale in comparison.
For years I've loved HP's printers but found the <i>drivers</i> to be a complete mess. I've been left with the sense that they have a incredibly solid hardware/firmware group, but the rest of their software was incredibly poorly designed: that they really didn't understand software at all.<p>Is there a compelling reason to believe that HP won't make a mess of the software in WebOS?
Man, that is a big pile of cash. It hardly seems worth it, but if HP wanted to be a player in the mobile space now they are.<p>But Palm has a (very long and storied) software problem, not a hardware problem. HP doesn't have much of a reputation in consumer-grade OS software development so I'm not sure how they will be able succeed where Palm failed.
All of you developers, does this excite you as a potential development platform now? Watching past Palm/webOS postings here not gain any traction made me wonder why. Was it the dismal outlook? Was there something wrong with the dev suite Palm offered? Does the hp acquisition change all that for you?
I can't imagine this going well for HP or Palm. Palm has already been passed around 5+ times and it just gets chewed up by bureaucracy worse and worse each time. HP also doesn't really have a strong history of stylish consumer electronics, particularly in the non-business market, which is frankly what the mobile market is all about. It's all about hearts & minds.<p>With Apple and Android clearly the top players, and Microsoft always being a long-term contender, I don't see how there's any room left in the marketplace for another major player.
I have to think that HP could just throw $100m at the problem and build an embedded OS that's far better than Palm, without having to take on the assets of a long-since failed corporation.