With due respect to Meg, the decision to the keep the PC business must have been made by the board, before her hiring. To her credit and HP's She is the hero, inadvertently making Leo look silly. Its the messaging that ran riots for HP as a brand. That's where Meg's presence if not anything else has been reassuring. Hope the right decision is made for Webos. HP or not its a good product. Thoughts on how to position it is more important than who will take over it.
mayurdeep.com
As predicted earlier today, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman did discuss the pending future of webOS with HP during an all-hands meeting on Tuesday evening.
However, what was revealed was not what was expected: meaning no decision at all just yet.
The Verge reports that Whitman summed up the next step as simply, “It’s really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,” adding that “If HP decides to do this [to keep webOS], we’re going to do it in a very significant way over a multi year period.”
That’s a bit of a change in behavior from Whitman’s last decision about keeping the PC unit rather than selling it, which was announced rather quickly after Whitman was brought on to HP in September when she replaced Léo Apotheker.
WebOS was one of the biggest (if not the most notable) purchases that HP has made in the last couple years after it acquired Palm for $1.2 billion. Taking that into consideration, it’s not that surprising that Whitman and company might want to take their times with this decision.
On the other hand, Whitman might very well likely cut webOS eventually as she has made it rather clear that she intends to reorganize and clean house as CEO — a rather sharp departure from the attitudes of both Apotheker and Mark Hurd before him.
Several big names of potential buyers, ranging from HTC to even Research In Motion, have been tossed around in last few months after the HP TouchPad became discontinued. Oracle, which might be a long shot came up most recently as such a purchase would boost Oracle’s patent portfolio in its battle against Google.
Related:
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- HP TouchPad app developers: Run to other platforms
- HP entices developers with $150 TouchPads; there is hope yet for webOS?
- HP offers counter approach to Facebook-driven green IT project
- HP’s Project Moonshot aims to make ARM servers mainstream
