No backsies. Seriously. The HP board's booting out of ex-CEO Leo Apotheker, who essentially worked as a saboteur trying to destroy the company, has raised the hopes of webOS fans around the world. But Humpty Dumpty can't be put together again. New CEO Meg Whitman will have enough work on her hands saving HP's core PC business and untangling Apotheker's strategy-shifting mess. She's not going to bring WebOS hardware back.
Let's look at the situation now: HP has flushed its inventory, broken contracts, and abandoned roadmaps. It's created an unrealistically low price expectation for the TouchPad; now that it was once $99, who's going to buy it at a profit-making $400? It's laid off 525 key webOS staff members, and everyone else in the WebOS unit is probably printing resumes like Ben Bernanke prints cash.
The Long Death of webOS
Remember, too, that the death of webOS hardware wasn't a single blow on August 18. Apotheker's disdain for that messy, consumer hardware business had been killing webOS before. The Pre 3, supposedly the OS's flagship phone, never came out, sticking AT&T with the adorable little Veer, which couldn't support the platform on its own. The future roadmap was basically sliced up and turned into paper airplanes. The company is too far behind to succeed.
Carriers and developers want a solid, predictable partnership from their OEMs and platform vendors, and I don't think HP can repair those relationships. There have been too many screaming U-turns. Would you commit a budget—and maybe the fate of your business, if you're a small developer—to HP's faith in the webOS platform, even if the company decides to suddenly paint it with blandishments? I don't think so.
Meg Whitman has a lot to do. HP spent $1.2 billion on Palm. More recently, it spent $10.3 billion buying enterprise software maker Autonomy, and has been talking about spinning off its PC business for up to $40 billion. While mobile is a growing market, Whitman clearly has to deal with the $50 billion worth of problems before the $1.2 billion.
Remember that Whitman, like Apotheker, is a software-and-services person, too. Her defining time was at eBay, which is a giant, scalable online service. She didn't buy companies that made hardware; she bought PayPal and Skype. Whitman might be the right woman to figure out what to do with Autonomy, and she's a more consumer-focused than Apotheker was. But neither her heart nor her experience is in hardware.
I would really love to be wrong here, but all the evidence is pointing in the same direction.
Windows Phones, From HP?
HP has done some weak hand-waving about licensing webOS, but I'm not sure that's viable, either. Who wants an OS that isn't being supported by its owner? The only way I could see webOS surviving in any form at this point would be for HP to completely open-source it and turn it over to the community.
If webOS isn't salvageable, Microsoft will be the big winner here. HP already has a strong relationship with Microsoft, and I can see Whitman doubling down on Microsoft hardware and software if she decides that webOS has just rotted too much to be saved.
That means Windows 8 tablets and PCs, to start, but it also might mean Windows Phones. Windows Phone has been gaining some traction—Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was making friendly noises about it this week—and HP could provide a strong enterprise-oriented partner for Microsoft now that it looks like Dell's phone strategy has, once again, failed.
Meg Whitman might be the right person for HP. She's certainly a better fit than Leo Apotheker. She might turn this thing around, and she might keep the PC business. But webOS fans need to pass into the "acceptance" stage of mourning; thanks to HP's mismanagement, the TouchPad and Pre are well and truly dead.