It’s one thing to buy a company and make it your own, taking over their innovation and another to take over a brand and completely destroy it. That’s what HP did to Palm and webOS, that are now on a path to destruction… HP spent around $3.3 billion in total for the webOS group of products and absorbing Palm completely.
The result is a bunch of failed webOS devices, including the TouchPad that got so bad at some point that it was part of a $99 fire sale, to get rid of the leftover units. Also, the follow-up tablet, the TouchPad Go with 7 inch diagonal went down the drain as well, with 100k units still there to be tossed around. Maybe they’ll be given to employees…
Now, HP has a new CEO, that for a while wanted the company to give up making PCs, tablets and phones, focusing on software instead. However Meg Whitman changed her mind, inspired by Steve Jobs and went back on the decision to give up PCs. Now the employees at HP await a decision regarding the company’s future in the following weeks. There’s an obvious choice here: selling WebOS to someone more capable to manage it and names like Amazon and Samsung popped up recently. Will HP go down because of the bad transaction?
