14 DAY TRIAL // HP is painting a pretty bleak picture for its webOS division, beginning serious staff reductions right around the winter holidays, but there is little stopping it now.
In fact, none other than webOS Developer Relations Community Manager Chuq von Rospach has announced that he, too, is leaving.
In this case, at least, it was an amiable exit, as he is going to take up a position with another company, where he will “build something similar” to webOS.
Rospach worked for almost three years with HP and, before that, he worked with Apple for 17 years as Senior Architect for the company's marketing e-mail system (ended in 2006).
The man said that his departure wasn't exactly a consequence of the decision to have webOS go open-source.
“This is a decision I've been pondering for a while. I've been in this role for almost three years and a couple of months ago I realized it was time to make a change,” he wrote in his sudden announcement.
“Back in October, I had a company come and recruit me and I decided it was an opportunity that I had to pursue. This has nothing to do with any of the announcements in the last couple of weeks. I think the decision to move webOS to an Open Source project is a great one and it's one I support fully and hope you will as well.”
HP has seen quite a few of its high-ranking executives leaving ever since the fiasco with the now-aborted plan to back out of the PC market.
Things seemed to calm down after Meg Whitman took the position of Chief Executive Officer and began to review that road, as well as the webOS situation.
Ultimately, HP decided not to leave PCs, but the webOS projects did all get canceled, with the OS, as already mentioned, being opened to any and all developers.
If any new HP webOS products show up from now on, it likely won't be before 2013.