webOS all-hands meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning - it all finally comes to a head
We've just received word that tomorrow will finally bring the answers for which we have been waiting. HP CEO Meg Whitman has weighed the options for what to do with webOS, and tomorrow at 10:30 AM Pacific Time we should finally get and answer.
Context & Ripple Effects
The endgame has been visible for months. Back in June, then-CEO Léo Apotheker floated licensing webOS to other manufacturers as an alternative to building hardware around it; by late October, reporting held that all prospects for an internal HP webOS had been largely destroyed. A first all-hands meeting in early November was expected to settle it and did not, leaving Whitman to promise on November 30 that a decision would come within two weeks.
Tomorrow's 10:30 AM Pacific meeting is that deadline arriving. The stakes are unusually high for a software platform: HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm in 2010, and even after discontinuing the TouchPad, the fire-sale tablet briefly made HP the No. 2 tablet maker behind Apple — evidence there was demand for the hardware, if not a viable business around it.
First-order effects
- HP's webOS engineering team and the remaining Palm organization learn their fate directly at the all-hands — whether the platform is licensed, sold, spun out, or wound down under Whitman.
- TouchPad owners and the webOS developer community get a definitive answer on whether the OS they built for has any future beyond the discontinued hardware.
Second-order effects
- If licensing is the outcome, prospective OEM partners become the immediate audience — but six months of public doubt about internal commitment makes convincing hardware makers to bet on webOS a steep sell.
- A shutdown or sale would put Palm's engineers and patents into play, with rival mobile platforms positioned to absorb both the talent and the intellectual property HP bought for $1.2 billion.
Third-order effects
- Whichever way Whitman goes, the episode hardens the lesson that a hardware company cannot sustain a third mobile ecosystem against iOS and Android without either massive scale or external partners — a pattern every would-be platform entrant now has to price in.
- For HP itself, the decision is a defining test of the new CEO's willingness to exit acquisitions that no longer fit, setting a template for how quickly she unwinds her predecessor's strategic bets.
The trend: Mobile operating systems are consolidating around two viable ecosystems, forcing acquirers like HP to choose between licensing, divesting, or abandoning the platforms they bought at premium prices.