One short year after spending $1.2 billion on webOS, HP has announced that it is giving the popular, yet unsuccessful operating system (OS) the boot. The news comes as a blow to webOS fans everywhere who have been expecting a webOS 2.2 update for their Palm Pre2s for a while now and were eagerly awaiting the seemingly indefinitely postponed Palm Pre3.
Those sure to feel the sting most keenly, however, are HP’s most recent TouchPad owners, who were recently lured in by a sudden and significant drop in the price of the infamous tablet.
Whether or not HP will be looking for an outside source to continue the webOS legacy is still uncertain. However, in the long run it’s unlikely as webOS has already failed twice and its final demise is likely to have few major ramifications in terms of market share.
WebOS has at best been struggling for a long time now in the face of competition from both Android and iOS. Now with Windows Phone entering the scene with a frankly astounding bang webOS was going to have to pull something really impressive out of its hat in the next few months or suffer the slow and undignified kind of death reserved for operating systems with a small, yet loyal fanbase. Perhaps it’s better that HP bit the bullet and called it quits now.
Still, it really is a shame that webOS seems destined to fail. It really was a great OS that seemed to suffer from nothing more than lack of intuitive support. Palm simply didn’t have the resources to push it out on a massive and hardware-oriented scale. HP, after buying Palm, seemed almost intent on screwing up in the marketing department at every turn, often leaving devices sitting quietly in the wings without so much of a whisper of an advertisement between their original announcements and eventual product launch.
What do you think? Are you going to miss webOS or do you think that, ultimately, not much will change as we move forward in to an Android, iOS and WinPho dominated world?
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