HP's Enyo team clarifies that the project will go on, though some ‘key members’ have left
An update was just posted up on the Enyo blog clarifying some of the rumors about the team leaving to go to Google. The statement mentions that some of the ‘key members’ of the team have left the company …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands at the tail end of a long unwind: HP cut roughly 500 people from its San Diego group in October 2011 and another 275 from the webOS division in February 2012 (the San Diego cuts, the February webOS layoffs), leaving little doubt the platform was being wound down rather than productized.
Earlier today The Verge reported exclusively that the Enyo team was headed to Google (the Enyo-to-Google report), and the pickup was broad — ZDNet ran it under 'RIP webOS: Again and for good this time,' with CNET, Wired and others following. The Enyo blog post is HP-side damage control: it confirms some 'key members' have left but insists the HTML5 framework project itself continues inside HP.
First-order effects
- HP keeps the Enyo framework alive on paper, but with confirmed departures among 'key members' its development now rests on whoever remains after successive rounds of webOS cuts.
- Google absorbs the engineers behind webOS's HTML5 application layer, adding front-end framework talent at no acquisition cost.
Second-order effects
- Developers who bet on Enyo face a stewardship question — a framework whose core team has partially walked out the door competes against better-staffed alternatives for mindshare.
- The coverage framing ('RIP webOS') pressures HP to either staff Enyo credibly or confirm what the obituaries already say, since every departure now reads as the platform's final chapter.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, shut-down platforms function less as products than as talent pipelines: competitors harvest the engineering teams of failed OS efforts, and the surviving asset is the codebase plus whatever skeleton crew stays behind.
- For buyers of HP's open-sourced webOS assets, the signal is that continuity depends on community uptake rather than corporate commitment — a template other stranded platform communities will be measured against.
The trend: Dead mobile platforms are being recycled as acqui-hire pipelines, with rival companies absorbing the teams even as the platforms themselves are formally discontinued.