
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
i think ill join you, this has to be the worst news ive heard for a while. Im surprised HP didn't give the tablet and webos a little more time, its only been a month, yeah sales have been a little slow but surely if they persist they would start making inroads.
Webos has/had so much potential, i think what would make me a sadder panda would be for webos to disappear, please Open source it HP, don't let it be merged in with Apple/Google/Microsoft's divisions.
Ill admit im a big apple fan and love using my iPad, but i was considering getting a WebOS tablet to try out when they had stabilised the software a little. Out of all of the iOS competitors i was convinced that WebOS was the only one to offer a real challenge, how wrong i was....
There are a lot of comments asking HP to open source webOS. My question is.... What for? There is not actually hardware able to run it (ok, you can argue saying that a lot of enthusiastic homebrew users can install it in their jailbroken ipads/galaxy phones/PCs, etc., but, sadly, the mobile OSes need a backing corporation able to create hardware to ship the OS into it; and as I said in other comment in this thread, no more open phones like the N900 in the current arena.
Do you really think HP cares about it? They are just taking care on their pockets (ok, any company would do that).
Edited 2011-08-19 05:02 UTC
You are right, they don't need another "useless" one, but a good one or great one (like iOS) would be OK. The more the merrier I say. I remember the days when most PC's you bought had different OS's on them, C64, Apple 2, Trash-80's, Amiga, BBC etc... As long as we can share data, who cares...
But are you surprised? HP and Dell started this 'race to the bottom' over a decade ago and this is where it has ended up - computer assembly companies on their knees to cater for Joe Sixpack wanting their $200 computer and not wanting to pay a cent more. Sorry but when you push down the price that low something is going to give out - your call centre is going to be pushed out to Timbuktu, corners cut and even those corners are eventually cut, and any sort of innovative idea will be cut the moment they don't sell 100million units in the quarter because they don't have enough profits generated from other divisions to carry a developing division into maturity.
I've been saying this the moment I arrived at osnews.com - and I am told that I've got it all wrong, I don't know what I'm talking about. Well twinkle toes it has all come home to roost and once again we have the race to the bottom mentality destroy an otherwise good idea. Side note though, I think the whole fiasco can be viewed in much the same way the US economy has developed where manufacturing and 'real work' has been pushed off to China with the BS being said that 'services are the future' - yeah, I'm sure the Americans are now enjoying that 9.2% unemployment and don't wish for those 'real jobs' to return to the US (OMG! I might get my hands dirty and chip a nail! OMG!)

Edited 2011-08-21 00:47 UTC
Kaiwai No shock to anyone who worked in SV for 20-30 years. This isnt new to us. We saw the same happen to the semiconductor business back in the 80s. It happened in a short period where we stopped making DRAM chips in the valley. That whole business was gone overnight.
Only those who came to SV in the past 10 years, never saw or could imagine such events happening.
Hey, we used to make everything from Semi, Harddrive, Sun workstations, to Apple macs in Santa Clara County.
If anything it was certainly the Netbooks under $500 coming out of Taiwan which killed off the HP PC business.
Member since:
2005-06-29
I'm just going to curl up in a fetal position and cry.