Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology.
HP’s decision to contribute webOS to the open source community represents, at least, a detour from the company’s plans to “double down” at the operating system acquired from Palm, Inc. The excellent news for fans of the OS is that HP will continue to take a position within the software’s development, albeit not likely on the unsustainable rate at which it was going it alone. And for webOS fans, the verdict is definitely more favorable than another possibility that HP considered — ending the advance of webOS software as abruptly because it ended the hardware..
Still, webOS faces an uphill climb whether it is to turn out to be a viable option for device makers. HP itself says that it could not enter the webOS device market again until 2013 and we have seen no public statements from other major device makers champing on the bit to construct devices according to the software, as a minimum not in its current state. That suggests that the addressable marketplace for webOS updates is the relatively meager installed base of TouchPads and the handful of Pres , Veers and Pixis , and lots of owners of these smartphones will likely move on as their contracts expire.. Surely, the clever open source community will give you the chance to get webOS on all types of existing devices. Here, the software will even get something of a helping hand from its rivals Android and the approaching ARM-based version of Windows. However, as Switched On discussed with reference to an Android netbook, that’s a good smaller hobbyist market.
One of the vital challenges that HP faced with webOS was that it had never been on the center of an ecosystem attempting to build a developer base for a shopper operating system. Likewise, though, it hasn’t ever been on the center of a main open source project, which involves managing not just internal development constituencies but external ones to boot. Still, HP says it’s able to step into the type of role that Google serves for Android.
Speaking of Android, its incredible momentum begs the question of whether we’d like another open source mobile operating system from which to determine. Perhaps probably the most viable recent open-source challenger to Android, MeeGo, managed in finding its way onto one phone (the Nokia N9) and one netbook (the ASUS X101) from major manufacturers before being folded into a further merged OS offering called Tizen. WebOS can even continue to stand intense competition from closed-source vendors Apple, RIM and Microsoft. These competitors can have development in high gear during a year when webOS goes through another transition.
Perhaps the most important question, though, lies not in whether HP and the open source community can execute on making webOS an improved competitor, but whether anything can carve out turf between the iOS monolith and the Android skyline. To date, such ground has not proven fertile within the mobile OS turnaround attempts of Microsoft and 1 RIM 1 . However, as mobile devices, particularly tablets, tackle more PC-like tasks, there’s the highly successful example of Windows at the PC to pursue, the very offering that HP — and plenty of other companies — won’t hesitate to embrace in future tablet generations before revisiting webOS..
Ross Rubin ( 2 @rossrubin 2 ) is executive director and principal analyst of the NPD Connected Intelligence service at 3 The NPD Group 3 . Views expressed in Switched On are his own.
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