Exclusive: HP's webOS Enyo team is going to Google
The HP team responsible for Enyo — webOS's HTML5-based application framework that debuted on the TouchPad — will be leaving the company and starting at Google shortly, The Verge has learned. What this means for the future of Open webOS is unclear …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Enyo exodus lands ten months into a slow unwind. After the 2011 leadership shakeup that put Stephen DeWitt over webOS and Jon Rubinstein on 'product innovation', HP cleared inventory with a $150 developer TouchPad offer and then contributed the whole OS to open source in December 2011 — a move widely read as an admission it had no hardware plans left for Palm's platform.
The same day this story ran, HP moved to contain it: the company said the Enyo project would go on despite 'key members' leaving. The pickup list tells its own story — ZDNet, TechCrunch, Engadget, Ars Technica and four more outlets all carried the departure within hours, framing it as the effective end of webOS rather than a routine hire.
First-order effects
- Open webOS loses the team behind its HTML5 application framework at exactly the moment HP needs outside developers to trust that the open-source project has engineering stewardship — HP's own statement concedes key members are gone while insisting work continues.
Second-order effects
- Google absorbs a proven cross-platform HTML5 framework crew, strengthening Chrome and Android's web-app story without acquiring anything; rival mobile-platform holders watching webOS now know open-sourcing does not retain the people who made the software valuable.
Third-order effects
- The pattern hardens: when a platform owner gives up on hardware, the code can be donated to the commons but the talent market reassigns the builders within months — meaning an open-source license is no guarantee of a living ecosystem, only of a preserved one.
The trend: Mobile platforms are dying as companies before they die as codebases: HP's open-source handoff of webOS preserved the software while the market immediately redistributed its creators.