HP's WebOS Reinvention Could Spread

No Jitter | blog | HP's WebOS Reinvention Could Spread

By Tom Nolle, CIMI Corp. | Mar 14, 2011 | No comments yet ...

HP's announcement that it would make WebOS available as a dual-boot standard on all its personal computers was pretty revolutionary in business terms. The company has built its PC business by riding the Windows wave, after all. The most interesting thing about the decision may not be whether it hurts Microsoft, but how it might impact enterprises and even consumers in the broadband space.
WebOS is an appliance operating system that HP got through the Palm acquisition (some would say it's the only thing they got). If HP is ever going to monetize its investment in Palm it has to make WebOS succeed as a competitor to smartphone and tablet OSs like iOS and Android, so you might wonder why they'd make a dual-boot decision for their whole PC line. I think there are two reasons, and both have the kind of broad impact that makes the move a potential game-changer for us all.

The first reason is that a decision to put WebOS on every PC creates a potentially enormous installed base very quickly. You don't have to buy a WebOS appliance to get it, you'll just have to buy an HP PC. But hey, everyone wants a big installed base to attract developers, so why is this important? Because HP has to not only get WebOS on the PC, it has to keep it there, and get it run by users. Users can uninstall or ignore the WebOS face of their PCs, after all, so all the dual-boot decision does is get WebOS an audition, not the part. That means HP will have to link WebOS to something convincingly valuable both for consumers and most significantly for enterprises.

It's pretty clear that one of those compelling linkages HP wants to exploit is the WebOS tablet, and the tablet explosion is really the driver for wanting WebOS to succeed--it grabs HP a seat at the table. But to justify WebOS with customers, HP will have to create application connections. That means a combination of a compellingly interesting GUI for developers to support and a really useful coupling to enterprise thin client and virtual desktop initiatives. Both make sense; HTML5 support is a given in any tablet or PC, and HTML5 is a good framework to exploit for developing consumer apps and enterprise application front-ends.

But it's value as part of the cloud that really will make or break WebOS. HP admits it's kind of lost its way with the cloud, and getting back on track through WebOS would kill two marketing birds with one stone. Any thin client or HTML5 browser is cloud-capable, but that's not enough of a differentiation. HP will have to launch its own host-side cloud strategy and make that strategy sing like a Stradivarius when implemented through WebOS.

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