14 DAY TRIAL // webOS is currently moving to open source
, and should breathe new life as soon as the transition to this licensing model is completed, HP believes.
In fact, the company is convinced that the OS will manage to top rival platforms such as Android and iOS, and says that it already has great advantages of them.
In all fairness, things don’t look like this at all now, but HP plans on reviving both the webOS team, as well as the platform they have been long working on.
HP has fired many Palm / webOS engineers and announced plans to discontinue the release of any webOS hardware. But the company has made up its mind on the platform, and will pursue its goal from now on.
“This has been a very rocky period for the former Palm team/webOS team that we built. And this was not a happy set of occurrences over the last six to eight months. So we have lost some people,” HP CEO Meg Whitman said in an interview with CRN.
“So now there is a clear vision of what we're trying to accomplish. There will be some people who will not love that vision, and then there are people who are very excited about this vision, and what it can mean for an alternative, open-source operating system that has some real strengths to it.”
She also said that the company was planning on rebuilding the webOS platform so as to make it worthy of competing with Android and iOS.
“We're going to build another operating system that has huge advantages, in my view, over iOS, which is a closed system, [and] Android, which is incredibly fragmented and may ultimately be more closed with [Google's] acquisition of Motorola Mobility,” she said.
No specific details on what the company’s plans for the platform would involve have been unveiled, but we might expect it to be loaded on both handsets and tablets, just as the current webOS platform was.