The last time we spoke with Stephen DeWitt, the top of HP’s webOS global business unit was at the defensive in regards to the TouchPad. Notwithstanding — or even due to — the anticipation of the device, the primary webOS tablet received a lukewarm reception at hands of reviewers. DeWitt vigorously defended the slate against the critics, suggesting that technology writers were approaching the product the other way. lots has happened since that conversation, needless to say, including reports of unmoved stock and, more significantly, yesterday’s news that HP would effectively be discontinuing production on its webOS devices, the TouchPad included.
There’s been a great deal of confusion around precisely what yesterday’s announcement means for both the corporate and the mobile operating system that it picked up with its purchase of Palm back in April of last year. Even with his understandably packed schedule, DeWitt sat down with us to set the record straight and shed some light at the way forward for webOS — a future both he and the corporate remain rather optimistic about.
Read on for the entire interview.
We heard you’re buying Motorola, is that right?
No, but you recognize certainly the landscape is fluid, and that i think it speaks to the truth that here’s the mobile space and all aspects of it and the way forward for connected devices — the company’s role in that equation is being vetted out immediately. So it’s a very fluid market and there are going to be lots of decisions. Obviously, Google decided that has pluses and minuses linked to it. We’ve made some decisions that experience pluses and minuses related to it, but we did it for a reason, and that i think you’ll see more activity. I certainly do not believe things are going to decelerate over the following handful of weeks or quarters. This is often important stuff.
Are you able to give us only a quick overview of exactly what that call is, because i believe there’s been lots of confusion on exactly what the announcement means?
I’ll attempt to use See Spot Run-type metaphors through all of this. What we decided to not do is build a tool-end of the equation. What we’ve got decided to do is put money into the webOS as a platform in order that we are able to deliver the kind of innovation in that platform to meet our vision of connected devices. There is a lot of pleasure around tablets which are on the market. Apple’s success within the pad market — bring it to mind took ages for Apple to get to the market. These haven’t been products which have been available in the market for ten years. These are products which have been available in the market for a number of years. These form factors have gotten everybody all for what the possible is from an application perspective, and applications are much more than simply tens of thousands of games. Applications are gonna be defined by various various things: vertical solutions… literally, i may spend an hour dealing with the several applications which are going to emerge which are ultimately going to be delivered on a connected device, whatever that connected device could be.
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And so we’ve got gone down a path, and it was form of the legacy Palm path, in the event you will, and we were vertically integrated. We did hardware design, we did hardware — we basically did the total stack, from the hardware up, and there advantages to doing that. There also are disadvantages to doing that, and so we made the choice to highlight the platform. Do something about the improvement of that platform to offer us flexibility for alternatives, in case you will, on the subject of how shall we bring webOS to the market and expand the ecosystem, and people opportunities and alternatives are pretty obvious. We will examine licensing; we will take a look at OEM and ODM-type relationships. There isn’t any one-size-fits-all here, because a one-size approach goes to restrict the potential for delivering tens of billions of connected devices — no less than in our opinion. So we made that call.
It does not imply — whatsoever, shape or form, in any respect — that we’re abandoning webOS. The truth is, we’re allowing webOS to meet the vision that i believe everyone within the industry desires to see, and that’s a viable alternative to other tablet or mobile operating systems which are available in the market which have their very own baggage.
Is that this a vision which you as an organization had foreseen for it slow now? Or is that this something that you’ve got arrived at given the ways that the hardware has performed?
That’s a great question. I’d say a little of both. The vision that we’ve got about — and we’ve been talking about this for months. I’ve certainly been on the market broadly talking about maintaining your state and the design center being you, and that on the end of the day the blurring between personal lives, professional lives, content creation, content consumption, all the various fine details linked to your eyeballs gazing a screen and what’s on there and the way that content’s delivered. That’s all been within the vision, but vision’s just vision. It is not the execution path.
So, to the second one component of your question, as we continued down the execution path, it became very clear that the investment that will was required to preserve that model would had been high investment cost, relative to another approach that may introduce significantly more flexibility into the system, let us focus our resources on what matters here, and what matters is the webOS. The platforms, that delivery vehicles, the auto through which webOS drives or the way it is delivered, is secondary to it being delivered. What’s in it? What innovative areas will we put money into? What is going to give us competitive advantage and differentiation relative to other players available in the market? You recognize, there is no question that seeking to do a me-too strategy or a quick-follower strategy in a market which is dealing with rapid redefinition immediately, isn’t going to fly. And that is why my answer is just a little of both.
Has the corporate been in talks with third party manufacturers?
After all we’ve got.
i do not suppose you could mention any?
Nope. Nope.
Does this decision have anything to do with Windows 8 and how we’re seeing Microsoft being somewhat more interested by the tablet?
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i do not know in case you are going to locate any company on the market that’s had an extended-term relationship with Microsoft than we have now. I mean, now we have intimacy up and down the stack with Microsoft, from the information center to the brink and all points in between. And that i think everyone knows, and that i certainly needn’t touch upon the challenges Microsoft had within the mobility space, and like the conversation we were having about Moto and Google, Microsoft is making moves, Nokia is making moves, others are making moves, since you have you ever must refine your portfolio, your strategy. You’ve gotta make decisions in relation to what your cloud vision goes to be. Is it going to be open? Is it going to be inclusive? Is it going to be closed door? Is it just my way or the highway? And that i think that generally, our way to Microsoft is not any different today or after this announcement than it was 72 hours ago.
We’re talking with Microsoft about Windows tablets. We’ve a Windows tablet available in the market immediately that’s greatly an answer in our vertical approaches — not something that we placed on the shelves of Best Buy, because, obviously, if you are going to be at the shelves of Best Buy, you’re competing against the iPad. So we’re certainly observing a broad solution to not just the devices themselves, but how all of those OSs are going to mature and collaborate with each other within the cloud future. We certainly — and this again isn’t new news — i used to be talking about this once I joined the team four weeks ago, and we’ve been talking about this broadly for the last handful of months: our approach is to be open and collaborative in our cloud vision, and that is in any respect levels. Instead of being closed and telling developers, “It truly is the model you’ll handle and that is it.”
So does that mean that we should always expect to determine more services for syncing across clouds? There are numerous services talking about syncing data within a single cloud, but, obviously, there are multiple clouds. Is that this something we should always expect HP to be targeting going forward?
I won’t specifically touch upon anything that HP is operating on in that area, but your assumption that that sort of cross-cloud pollination is a superb idea — we agree.
Is that this move clear of these specific devices, has this freed the resources at HP so far as engaged on additional pieces of hardware inside the company that utilize the OS?
The primary a part of your question was a powerful yes, however the second part — the shift in models does give us tremendous flexibility in relation to where we invest our resource. The first, the overpowering investment that’s going to come back from that’s into the webOS platform: innovative new areas / trajectories for our development efforts, global efforts, lots of things that we have at the planning stage which might be going to matter out there down the street. Not necessarily in a pari passu bake off against an Android tablet or an iOS tablet. We’re brooding about the long run.
We’re also fascinated with what we’ve heard absolutely in an avalanche from our commercial customers, that they’re unsatisfied with the devices which are available in the market today. And this is not just simply about making a management infrastructure so one can wipe info off this kind of devices — I mean, that’s table stakes. Here’s about creating truly integrated solutions, where an endpoint has to have a undeniable set of characteristics to it, and a undeniable way that applications are delivered, and a undeniable human experience that goes with that. This company has an extended heritage of creating solutions. Think about the medical industry. Examine each of the industries where HP has built solutions and built markets out of that. We are going to take the identical approach with the webOS and if you want to present itself over the years, across a large arena of devices.
It sounds to me that you’re no less than nowadays taking the opportunity of, not a duplicate-cat device, but a typical consumer tablet or an average consumer smartphone running webOS off the table, to your own production.
For our own soups and nuts, I’d say that’s fair — yeah. With regards to us doing everything up the stack, what we announced yesterday is we aren’t building the devices.
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