Hewlett-Packard’s foray into smartphones, following its purchase of Palm, was a disaster, and the promised return to the market has not yet materialized – and will revolve around more mainstream operating systems than Palm’s webOS. However, the PC giant hopes to make at least some return on its failed adventure by selling some of the patents store that came with webOS.
According to Bloomberg sources, HP has approached potential buyers of various patents, including those related to webOS, which the company placed in an open source project when it cancelled its own smartphone and tablet efforts last year. It has also removed some restrictive conditions that had previously made the assets difficult to buy at a good price.
The purchase of Palm in 2010, followed by the abrupt abandoning of the platform, is one of the worst episodes of HP’s recent history. Under its previous CEO, Leo Apotheker, webOS went from being the centerpiece of a strategy for HP to establish its own software in every cloud-connected device, to being canned altogether, in the space of a few months.
His successor, Meg Whitman, gave webOS a very partial reprieve as an open source program within a subsidiary called Gram, and subsequently sold the OS code to LG in February, though HP kept the patents, just licensing these to the Korean firm. Whitman has promised a new mobile device and platform strategy, probably based around Android and Windows, but details and timescales remain vague.
As with most of its mobile moves, HP has got the timing wrong. It has missed the bubble around wireless patents which was created in 2011 by huge deals such as Google’s IPR-driven acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn, and the sale of Nortel’s stockpile for $4.5bn to a consortium including Apple and Microsoft. Interminable court battles have placed question marks over the value of some of the mobile patents involved in those deals, and the dash for IPR has slowed as the big rivals seem to have built the defences they need now. InterDigital, a huge holder of mobile IPR, changed its own plan to sell most of its hoard, indicating that the bubble had burst.
Bloomberg’s sources indicated that the LG deal would be unlikely to hinder HP’s ability to sell webOS patents, and presumably the Korean firm ‘ which has shown interest in developing its own platform as an Android alternative, and using webOS in smart TVs ‘ might be a potential buyer, though HP is not commenting on the reported sale at all.
In March, LG acquired webOS, mainly to differentiate itself in the difficult connected TV market. The firm took on webOS’s source code and its development team, and continues to support the open source project started by HP, allowing webOS to be used by external developers. Gram and LG had been codeveloping a webOS-based television for several months before the deal.
Earlier in the year, LG had added five new names, including Panasonic and IBM, to its Smart TV Alliance, focused on building cross-platform applications and services for these products and so up its game against Samsung, the market leader. The smaller Korean company has been linked with almost every mobile operating system around as it tries to carve out a unique identify from underneath the shadow of its larger compatriot in mobile and TV. Rumors have seen it creating products running MeeGo, Firefox and Baidu as well as webOS.
Despite the change of ownership, a small but enthusiastic developer community survives around open source webOS – one of its strengths is the Enyo application development framework. This may indicate how the OS landscape will develop around post-PC and media devices in future. This would see a range of open projects fostering innovation in apps and services, all tied together by common browsers and HTML5, rather than a battle between two or three monolithic, vendor-controlled platforms.
Perhaps this will be an option for BlackBerry 10 in future, along with Mozilla, Ubuntu and the others. For webOS, this would be more in line with Apotheker’s vision ‘ poorly executed, but with a real sense of how the multi-device future would pan out ‘ of an OS that can be embedded in all kinds of gadgets, rather than being confined to a single form factor such as a smartphone.