HP lays off 275 employees from webOS division
We've just received word that HP has laid off more than 270 employees from its webOS division as it “no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before.” This follows just behind the departure …
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's $1.2 billion purchase of Palm has now unwound in stages: the TouchPad bombed at retail, all webOS hardware was killed off, and an October round of layoffs cut roughly 500 people from the San Diego group. Today's cut of 275 more engineers and related staff is the continuation of that retreat — a division being stripped down rather than rebuilt.
The shape of the endgame matters more than the headcount. Since November, Reuters has reported HP weighing a sale of the webOS unit, with VentureBeat sources citing a $1.2 billion asking price, while Meg Whitman has publicly mused about an unconfirmed open-source future for webOS alongside Android and iOS. Cutting the engineering team shrinks both the cost base and the asset any buyer would be acquiring.
First-order effects
- The webOS division loses most of its remaining engineering capacity, confirming HP is maintaining — not developing — the platform after killing all webOS hardware in 2011.
Second-order effects
- A leaner webOS organization makes the reported sale process easier to price but harder to sell: prospective buyers get the patents and software at a lower carrying cost, minus the team needed to evolve them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, HP becomes another major OEM to exit proprietary mobile OS development entirely, reinforcing the iOS-and-Android duopoly and making an open-source handoff the only realistic path left for the platform Whitman once floated.
The trend: Hardware makers that built their own mobile operating systems are dismantling them under cost pressure, conceding the OS layer to iOS and Android.