|
|
It will certainly be an interesting ride over the next year, or so. First, I think we need to realize that while the OS is going to be open source, if it succeeds at any scale it will be with a few firms investing heavily in it and exercising enough influence to effectively control the direction of the OS. Perhaps the control would somehow be through the app catalog (ie they publish some set of standards for app submissions and commit to supporting and following it, or something like that). Someone could take the OS and do their own thing with it, but in the process they greatly restrict their access to applications and support (since the bigger players in this arena would have committed to this other path). Unless you're Amazon, I think that's an awful big price to pay and most would sign on to the communities vision for the OS. Yes, there will be hobbyists and some specialized versions of the OS, but anyone that wants to play on the webOS team in scale will likely (almost certainly) choose to be a part of the community and play nice with the other community members. I'm not an expert of open source governance structures, but it seems to me HP is setting up this project where someone who wanted to make devices could have a voice in the OS governance. I think this would be significantly different than Android and might appeal to some device manufacturers, especially firms like LG and Sony that do not appear to have had great success with Android and might want to leverage webOS for a bit more than just phones.
Nonetheless, a lot of webOS's future still rests on HP's next steps. This process takes a lot longer than any of us would like, but such is the reality of turning around a fairly large organization. Thus far, Ms. Whitman has, I think, made good decisions and seems committed to taking webOS as far as she can. If they can hit a solid double with a tablet device next year, I think webOS will have a solid shot a being back in the game.
If I were in her position, I would have my enterprise software folks working on some kind of enterprise package built on webOS I could push through my enterprise channels. It would probably be built on the idea of a true cloud based computing existence; a consistent computing experience and capabilities regardless of where you are and what device your are using. At the same time, I would have the hardware folks developing a tablet with specs and features acceptable to consumer and business customers with full tablet features that we can produce and sell at a price significantly less than the iPad and Samsung tablets. It's not a sexy strategy, but it leverages the competitive advantages HP can bring to the market and is the most likely strategy to gain significant market share. Ideally, HP would also leverage some of its additional holdings to bring features to the tablets and additional revenue streams to HP. By this, I'm thinking a full featured music/media management app built off of Melodeo to allow you manage your media from anywhere and something based of Snapfish for picture management and such. I will agree with the original poster that a truly ideal world would have HP and the OpenWebOS governance group announcing their new tablet at CES in 2013 with availability that day, or less than a month afterward and then whetting our appetite by announcing an agreement for (insert phone OEM here) to produce OpenWebOS phones which will run on ATT and/or Verizon.
We will see. Regardless, it should be an interesting ride
Gargoyle
|
|
|
Originally Posted by SnotBoogie
(Happy A Lot, As A Good Carioca!)
