Thread: webOS cost HP $3.3 Billion..

Wonder how much more they are willing to invest..

We knew that HP’s gamble on webOS was an expensive one, but thanks to the company’s Q4 and full-year financials, we’re finally getting a feel for just how dearly the webOS experiment cost them. This past year, the company lost a staggering $3.3 billion thanks to their most recent foray into the mobile space.



I know I’m not the first to say this, nor will I be the last, but one word comes to mind: Ouch.
HP’s financial results also reveal that the TouchPad fire sale netted HP $200 million in revenue, though the tablets were sold below cost. It certainly explains why the company seems intent on using their remaining TouchPads to drive sales across their other product lines. It’s perhaps a fitting end for the TouchPads — the HP tablet that didn’t sell was used to support a division of HP’s business they nearly sold.

I was a very big fan of webOS (the Pre was the first phone I ever sat in line for), and to see it lose support so unceremoniously was actually sort of painful. Frankly speaking it was unlikely that webOS would have ever become a major player in the market, but it still embodied a few concepts (cards/multitasking, for one) that deserve to live on. And live on they may, if HP can decide what the next step is.

As Greg pointed out a few months ago, webOS isn’t completely dead yet — rather, it’s stuck in OS limbo while HP decides what to do with it. Earlier reports suggested that HP would sell off webOS to whomever wanted it most, but newly-installed CEO Meg Whitman said it was important to make “the right decision, not the fast decision,” and held off on the sale. Now that we understand how much webOS cost HP, I’m surprised HP didn’t cut webOS free as soon as they could, but the waiting game continues and we’re still left without answers.

So, with the year’s numbers on the books, HP has a decision to make: should they go ahead and sell webOS? Or should they take the “expensive bet” and give webOS another go? Or should they pursue some other unseen option? Meg Whitman said that answers would come within the span of a few weeks, and that time is running out. What’s it going to be, Meg?
-TechCrunch

wow !!!! thanks for the post, I hope webos is here to stay, it is a wonderful os, i like it so much better than driod, just needs some wrinkles worked out

Yeah, I was guessing about 2.5. . .

It's a black hole, and I think HP was sold a bunch of BS by Palm when they purchased them--clearly webOS was NOT designed form the ground up to scale to any screen size. If that were the case they would have had the tablet OS out quickly. No, wait! They wouldn't need a tablet OS.

Originally Posted by TPwebOS820

Yeah, I was guessing about 2.5. . .

It's a black hole, and I think HP was sold a bunch of BS by Palm when they purchased them--clearly webOS was NOT designed form the ground up to scale to any screen size. If that were the case they would have had the tablet OS out quickly. No, wait! They wouldn't need a tablet OS.

It can scale any app, just looks pixelated. i don't think any OS right now can scale up to a tablet resolution without losing quality.

Although I picked up an HP Touchpad, I did so, more for the hardware than the OS.
I think WebOs is okay and all, but having a gazillion apps would make it great.

Getting this $100 hardware to work with any established OS would make me happy.
Hell, if the hardware could support Win XP, I'd need a moment to myself.
Don't even tease me with the idea of a hackintablet.

For now, I'll just patiently wait to see what the future brings.
WebOs gets me online and mostly gives me access to what I need.
Netflix, sigh.

Originally Posted by gadgetBOY

It can scale any app, just looks pixelated. i don't think any OS right now can scale up to a tablet resolution without losing quality.

I don't mean scaling up the apps. I mean that the OS was designed to utilize different screen sizes--what Android has now accomplished with ICS (4.0). Palm/HP pretty much stated that the TouchPad OS was written from the ground up for the tablet--it shouldn't have needed a total rewrite if it was designed in the first place to scale properly to different screen sizes, that doesn't mean stretching an app to fit the screen. It means designing the OS to properly utilize the screen size and to scale properly to different screen sized, thus the SDK/NDK would have built into it proper methods for app development that would also scale properly--not a phone size window or a pixelated stretched app. This is what we will see from now on with Android 4.0+ -- it will properly scale and properly use screen real estate from zero to 50+ inches for apps that are written properly.