Leo Apotheker has big plans. HP (relatively) new CEO wants to transform the company, and is willing to break with almost everything his predecessor Mark Hurd set out. How about webOS on every computer shipped by HP?
Apotheker is pretty harsh about HP’s current state. “HP has lost its soul,” he stated. To get that soul back, he first started listening to the people working at HP. “The first thing I wanted to do when I joined HP was listen to the people. The rank and file usually know about all the shortcomings.”
Mark Hurd, HP’s previous CEO, didn’t like software all that much, and according to Apotheker, this has made HP slow to react to changes in the market. As such, he wants to strengthen the company through acquisitions – and of course, Palm is part of that strategy.
Apotheker wants every computer sold by HP to have the “ability” to run webOS. What exactly this means, I don’t know; does this mean every HP computer will ship with webOS by default? Will it be an option during the order process? Or does “ability” literally mean ability – as in, every HP computer can run webOS, but it’ll be something geeks will have to download and install manually.
Another welcome change is that he wants HP to refocus on quality. “Apotheker also aims to revive HP’s emphasis on product quality, saying that when hardware performs better right out of the gate, the company incurs lower service and warranty costs – and customers are happier,” BusinessWeek writes, “He’s rehiring quality-assurance experts fired under Hurd and giving new responsibilities to those he says got ‘sidelined’ by the former CEO.”
“We have cut enough costs,” Apotheker told BusinessWeek.
I’m getting the feeling Apotheker wants HP to be more like Apple. While my personal experience with Apple’s product quality and reliability has been rather abysmal, there’s no denying that at least in surveys (as opposed to my anecdotal evidence) the company scores pretty good on these factors. HP wants that, too, I think.
All in all, it seems like Apotheker has the right idea: their own operating system and software and a focus on hardware quality.
A ‘Fisher Price’ OS on a full-blown PC? No thanks
I would say that the offerings from Microsoft and Apple tend to look like they collaborated with Fisher-Price as well.
well I haven’t seen anything indicating they are abandoning windows, and I can’t imagine them doing such a thing. Though I’m not quite sure exactly how they will implement webOS, as an instant on option, a preinstalled virtual machine, or an emulator, or a simple application within windows. But however it comes it will almost certain be a companion to windows (and other webOS devices) rather than a replacement.
WebOs on the desktop could be used to probvide continuity from your phone to you desktop, the state of applications and the data you are working with could be transfered to and from your desktop. Imagine for instance, that when you place your webOS phone onto its touchstone charger, connected to your computer, suddenly all messages going to your phone appear on your desktop as well, and you can respond to them from your desktop. Or the tabs you had open in your phone browser get imported to your desktop browser. This is all baseless speculation on my part of course, but with a little imagination I think you could come up with ways that tighter integration between your phone and your desktop could be useful. If HP has even the slightest amount of imagination I’m sure they could come up with a few ways to make their phone and their desktops play nice together.
Or they could screw it up and it will be totally useless.
For all we know, webOS might just be shipped as a SplashTop replacement for Windows desktops / laptops.
It’s certainly too early to be making assumptions based on the term “ability”.
Their laptops work very well and are reliable for everyone I know using them, making HP my second favorite in that area (after Asus).
Don’t know about their desktop offering, though. In 2002, they shipped some terrible PCs with nonstandard motherboards and noisy fans that can’t be replaced with bigger ones. Hope they have improved since. If not, this new CEO is right that they need some more QA
Edited 2011-03-09 19:48 UTC
Conversely I’ll state that I have had nothing but trouble with HP laptops. Fried internals, bad and unresponsive support and somewhat dodgy manufacturing…
No problems with the desktop boxes I’ve seen (they were all asus components inside though).
Here here! HP have the worst laptops in terms of failure rates and reliability, I learned that lesson the hard way.
Lol. I love how everyones experiences differ. Ive never had an issue with hp’s laptops. Owned. Bunch And all the ones I stll own work fine.
No, HP has the worst malfunction rate in the entire industry: http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/17/reliability.study.has…
Hmmm – granted, this is over a year old, but…
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/17/reliability.study.has…
I agree with your point on ASUS – bought my mom a netbook over 2 years ago, still works like a champ, battery included…
My own 1201N bought exactly a year ago is flawless. I can’t wait for their new tablet line.
As to HP – I only owned printers before, and they did go down the drain qualitywise in the past 5-6 years. I was just shopping for a low-end multifunction device, spent half a day researching my options. At the price point I was looking at ($2-300) I’ve read dozens of horror stories about the low built quality of HP MFs. Customer reviews (amazon, zdnet) along test sites pointed me to Canon and Brother machines. Finally, I went with the former, since no manufacturer offered full duplex (printing/photocopying on both sides) at this price point. Got the MF4320d (3 in 1, printer, scanner, copier) for about $250 and very happy with the results. Build quality seems very solid, it’s fast, green (low energy use + saving paper thanks to duplex) and silent.
I’m suspecting that WebOS will be an optional install for desktops and mobiles. I hope that WebOS can be installed on previous machines too
no, can be optional on the desktop, while a primary on mobile systems. think about webos smartphones.
*can’t uppercase my desktop got messed up.
At one end it could just mean driver support and the ability for geeks to hack it on there.
The other end could mean they actually ship with it installed as dual boot.
What will probably happen is somewhere in between…. meaning a download from some hard to use website trying to find the right installer for you particular model.
Exactly WebOS supported on their multiple hardware it just means hardware more friendly to standard Linux installations
So does HP plan to ditch Windows monopoly from their desktop/laptop machines? Currently it’s pretty hard to get their computers without an OS, or with a free one at least.
It will probably be a splashtop like experience. Full Windows will still be there.
I doubt the value of this since, when do people perform a shutdown these days on Laptops? … Takes seconds to come out of hibernate and almost instatly from sleep.
Oh great… more crapware I have to remove… HP I would pay you extra to not get this.
WebOS will probably be HP’s version of DeviceVM’s Splashtop.
Not installed on the hard drive but in flash memory somewhere on the mobo.
I was thinking the same thing.
In my mind, it’d work well for an all-in-one PC, where you turn the screen on and WebOS is already loaded, with access to plenty of light-weight apps, and you just tap in icon for Windows to bring up the rest of the system.
I hope they don’t try to turn it into a full desktop OS. That would ruin it for mobile users.
Keep in mind folks that most (non-game) apps written for webOS use web technologies, which means the OS core underneath is largely irrelevant. In fact, one of the official ways to develop webOS apps is via their completely web-based IDE (“Ares”), and they even encourage people to test apps in-browser. Thus, porting webOS apps to other platforms should be really easy (assuming sensible licensing for redistributing the JavaScript libraries).
But anyway, what I am getting at is that when they say “webOS on every computer” it might just as well mean “webOS apps/services running on top of XYZ via a WebKit wrapper”. Thus, the “integration” with Windows has the potential to be quite seamless.
Or they might do a full-blown instant-on webOS. Or both.
The only aspect of this that I wonder about is whether this means that they plan to integrate a touch screen on every PC, or whether they are counting on developers to make their apps mouse-friendly. As things stand on webOS phones, there are certain interaction paradigms, e.g. swiping right to delete an entry from a list, swiping left on the gesture bar to go back, and flicking cards up off the screen, which wouldn’t translate too well to mouse interaction methinks. That said, in the TouchPad demo I saw no evidence of either a gesture bar or the swipe-to-delete gesture, so maybe this is a sign that they are already preparing for convergent development.
Edited 2011-03-09 21:46 UTC
Wouldn’t it make more sense to:
Fork / develop webOS-2 into a separate, non GUI Linux OS, and run Windows on it inside a virtual environment.
This would be the best of both worlds, a solid and secure OS that can restore Windows any / every time it’s compromised, and the people that can’t deal with change, can continue to plod along with Windows as always.
Edited 2011-03-09 22:16 UTC
Hm, why do you need webOS for that? Grab Debian, Fedora or anything else in a headless form and use it.
So, you think it would make sense to remove GUI from WebOS, thus removing the key component that makes WebOS special, and use that to virtualize Windows, giving everything more advanced than word processing poor performance, especially when I/O is needed?
Why is this a good idea?
Note that keeping Windows running well is easier than ever, and a much smaller headache than having to backup files and restore an OS every time something goes wrong.
Quote: why do you need webOS for that? Grab Debian, Fedora or anything else in a headless form.
Quote: would make sense to remove GUI from WebOS
Yes, I agree with you both. Another angle, HP develops it’s own Linux distro “called” webOS-2 and uses it as the article describes.
I would see advantages in marketing a well known “name” regardless of the hardware or architecture….
smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, toasters, etc, X86, ARM, etc
Quote: to virtualize Windows, giving everything more advanced than word processing poor performance
The company I work for is #184 in fortune 500. The plant I work for has…. stretching it 3 people who would actually need more than “word processor” power.
Quote: keeping Windows running well is easier than ever, and a much smaller headache than having to backup files and restore an OS
I was thinking along the terms of a simple desktop snapshot to restore.
I’ll be the first to admit though I’m not an IT guy. Although I have gotten asked to help with computer issues a few times.
Our hardware is Levono “IBM” and we still run XP and just recently updated to IE7.
Where’d my edit button go??
I was thinking along the terms of a simple OS snapshot to restore.
The last Windows XP computer I “fixed” for a friend, took the better part of an afternoon to get straightened out.
Would have been much quicker and easier to just reinstall, but I was trying to do a favor and save it. She has a dual boot XP & Linux now.
So… nothing in this article matters to you.
Nothing in this comment has anything to do with this article…
bit off topic but while where on the topic linux pc’s
intro… article below discussed this need to recompile that applications..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/05/microsoft-windows-…
If software companies have to sort off recompile their applications to some degree for the ARM platform in two years to support Win8/ARM, might they as well develop it on a crossplatform dev. enviroment…
Recompiling is not rewriting but if you recompile it, can you recompile it for Linux in one dev enviroment?
Maybe an unusual upward spike in Linux support in to three/years…
Chances are no.
It takes an enormous amount of effort to ensure portability when writing code. CPU portability is not so hard if you write in a high level language, to the point where most Windows apps probably just need “a recompile” to run on Windows/ARM. Making your application also work on a totally different OS is a completely different (and huge) challenge for any non-trivial program.
Unless the Windows application was written via a cross-platform toolkit and the developers have already taken care not to introduce any Windowsisms then you will need more than a recompile to make it run on Linux. Even if some care had been taken to be portable chances are that you would have to write *at least* a small amount of code for the “Linux layer” that would necessarily sit under your cross platform code when running on Linux. In all probability most applications would require what amounts to a total rewrite to run on Linux, or would require serious hackery with wine. Both of these things are extremely non-trivial and would not happen for most vendors without some major economic incentive.
Recompiling for Linux would mean either that the application is already based on a crossplatform toolkit/layer, or that the system API calls are portable, which isn’t the case. So no, I don’t foresee the spike in Linux support. Unless of course, Linux does (in an attempt to generate that spike) add support for the Windows API, I mean directly and not via Wine.
Recompiling applications to be compatible to specific hardware arch is not a simple thing, and even then, it is almost equivalent to re-writing the application from scratch. The only advantage is that you already have the application logic. You have to consider your target’s environment, existing dev libraries, IDEs and support that depends on your application requirements.
That is why, Win8 for Arm will still years to become an accepted platform for developers, methinks.
While switching architectures is non-trivial at the application layer, it’s not as bad as you make it sound. Especially once the application has been “broken loose” from its original platform of development. Areas where you might expect trouble are apps that use highly-optimized or machine-specific code for various purposes (audio and video codecs spring to mind, Microsoft Excel is another example actually since it uses an optimized calculation engine), and apps that do complex multi-threading (using exotic synchronization). It’s a bigger deal when going for 32 to 64-bit architectures.
Aside from these cases, it really is just a recompile away and some testing and a few targetted bugfixes at issues which were never problems on previous architectures. Switching OSes is a far bigger deal.
Keep in mind that 90% of all computer users are NOT geeks or nerds. They couldn’t care less about everything that geeks and nerds care about.
They care about simple things like, can I get to my email. Can I get to Facebook. Can I Tweet? And other things that absolutely do NOT need Windows or any other “heavy” OS.
Think I’m wrong? Ask your non geek/non nerd family members what THEY care about when it comes to computers. You may be surprised at their view of the world and computers.
Where do I get 90%? The world has 6.5 billion people. How many nerds and geeks are there. That would make us less than 10% actually.
So… you made the numbers up…
Microsoft wouldn’t be where it is today if it didn’t know how to deal with uppity OEMs. I am sure HP and their new CEO will fall in line with Redmond soon.
One, it can be a cold boot of the machine. I frankly don’t see that, as no one will use it that way. Not yet at least.
The other way is as a fat layer on top of windows where the webOS apps run like WIndows “Widgets” do now — a sandbox in their own window.
The 3rd way is running “pure” webOS transparently in a VM with some host integration. This will be nice for developers, as well as users who may want to get more mileage and use out of their webOS apps.
The benefit is that if it doesn’t take off, no real harm. I don’t think it’s going to be a huge engineering effort to pull this off. If it DOES take off, then it instantly expands the penetration of webOS in to the market place.
It won’t cede windows (or anything else), especially short term, but it will let folks buy little games and other apps and use them in more places, and make webOS more endearing to its users.
WebOS..SchWebOS.. I think this was the most salient item in the article…
“Apotheker, 57, resigned as CEO of German software maker SAP AG in February 2010 amid falling sales, clashes with unions over job cuts and a price increase that vexed customers.”
He claims HP has “lost their soul”. Maybe he can replicate what he did at SAP AG and lose HP’s money, as well….
You can “Be good” and you can “Score well” but you can’t “Score good.”
On topic, I wish HP the best of luck. They are a long-time Linux supporter and have pretty decent hardware, faults included. If Meego continues to go nowhere and since Android is not very normal perhaps WebOS will be the Linux-based platform of choice for everything at some point. I would be okay with this, but HP absolutely has to allow and encourage multiple vendors to adapt it and ship it. The reason Android does as well as it does is that it’s cheap and adaptable and, critically, you can’t fight everybody. Windows can defeat Amiga and Mac OS because these are all single-vendor systems. UNIX was a pretty big success as far as it went because it was multi-vendor. The fact that forks and incompatibilities ruined it doesn’t change the fact that for a time it was pervasive and its downfall is not something that must necessarily happen to all similar products. Apple can be better than the competition all day long but it won’t matter in the long run if there’s only one Apple and one iPhone where there are a hundred competitors shipping Android. Microsoft succeeded with Windows in part because it ran on hardware anybody could make: it was multi-vendor. If HP wants to they can still be the foundational force behind “the mobile phone platform” via WebOS, and if they’re skilled businessmen this can be parlayed into “the platform” for a large array of devices, including regular PCs. But, to do it they’ve got to open up the system and let it be multi-vendor. It’s not good enough to make a nice phone and sell it to 5% of the market. What you want is to make a nice phone OS and have everyone else ship it to 90% of the market. There’s a lot more revenue in it, down the line, then having a flash in the pan today.
What do you mean Android is not normal? What is normal about webOS? The kernel and low level userspace are but the ui certainly isn’t (at least for most application developers).
For WebOS the UI/graphics layer is the only thing that’s purely custom, whereas with Android the entirety of userspace is custom.
I don’t see it like that (that they have to allow other vendors in to really succeed), it’s their OS, their IP and crucially -I am surmising- will remain more profitable to HP powering only their hardware especially in the medium and medium-long term. Having WebOS instances of whichever kind available to all HP PCs too, should broaden the developer appeal more than sufficiently to breathe life into the platform yet keep the profits internal.
As you also say, you can’t ‘fight everybody’ (!) , fair point and I agree but also, you have to ask do you want to? ..I think to be a sizeable fish in the mobile pool is probably HP’s aim here, and pushing some artificial and unnecessary desire to dominate the other players and push far out in front of the competition would I believe only hurt their reality. Plus, the PC side together with the phone/tablet could really give them the big, broad, stable and enticing ecosystem that they want.
It’s a bit like the huge fallacy of a white elephant in modern economics ….you don’t actually have to have a consistently growing economy or company to have a perfectionly functional one. Well with listed companies and all the shareholders and dealers involved , sadly you do, but academically, you certainly don’t.
I want HP to make WebOS “the platform” for mobile computing because in the end there will be a common platform and I don’t want it to be Windows again and I don’t really want it to be Android. It’s not that they *have* to do this to be successful, but if they don’t they’ll be yet-another mobile phone manufacturer and get sidelined by whatever becomes the platform in 5-10 years.
Why peddle a few phones for a modest profit when you can become the people in charge of the industry? It makes good business sense to try for it, at least, and I don’t think the possible short-term impact on sales is a sufficient deterrent.
> webOS on every computer shipped by HP
“Ok guys, let’s port webOS to the Integrity series — we *absolutely* must have it running on our server line, too! Alas, no more HP-UX updates for you…”
Port the presentation layer to OpenVMS, and you’d be left with what would quite possibly be the least focused OS ever created.
(Hmm – is the name WebVMS available?)
Is my brain the only one screaming Haiku while I’m reading this?
I am glad to hear this! HP has the hardware and the best OS right now on their hands to sell a very unique product without relying on Microsoft or Google Android.
This the best move that HP can make.
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