HP to issue its final verdict on webOS in 2 weeks, Apple to overtake HP as biggest PC vendor
webOS has been left on life support in the last couple of months after Leo Apotheker announed that HP is pulling the plug on the mobile platform it acquired from Palm a year ago. HP’s investment in the platform however was more than the $1.2 billion the company spend on the acquisition - an additional $1.66 billion in expenses within the last year make it one of the most expensive pieces of abandonware.
But is webOS really going to be abandoned? We don’t have clarity yet - HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman decided that it’s worth reconsidering the options and possibly taking more time to look for a buyer. What Whitman now promises though is final clarity in two weeks, according to an interview she gave for French newspaper LeFigaro. A Google translation of the passage reads:
What will you do with your operating system webOS? We should announce our decision in the next two weeks. This is not an easy decision, because we have a team of 600 people which is in limbo. We need to have another operating system.
Interestingly, Whitman also spoke about HP’s PC department noting that if the iPad counts as a PC, Apple will overtake HP as the top vendor in the near future. Hewlett-Packard will only be able to recover in 2013. HP killed its iPad rival, the 9.7-inch HP TouchPad around a month after its launch. Due to the firesales that followed, the TouchPad became the most popular non-iPad tablet in recent history.
source: LeFigaro (translated) via AllThingsD
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