HP CEO Leo Apotheker has some crazy interesting things to say about the best neglected platform in smartphones: webOS. Like that he’s open to licensing webOS to other phonemakers – HTC, for instance.
Reiterating what HP has been saying about webOS since its big coming out party in February, HP is “getting ready to put webOS into primetime”. Like on “every printer we ship” and PCs. At first, on top of Windows, not replacing it. But the outcome, he thinks, is this:
The consumer PC business is in a kind of valley, I think it will come out… but the classic world we’re all familiar with, the wintel world, is starting to see some competition. I think over the next three or four years, these worlds will merge together. We’ll see a whole new set of form factors.
So far, Apotheker says he’s been trying “to shelter Palm from bureaucracy” within HP, which is a great thing. In fact, he says, “The one thing I regret is that HP didn’t take Palm and webOS to market quicker – it would have made my life easier.”
So yeah, webOS. It’s either going to be a huge platform on everything that HP can shove it on, or you know, a massive failure of epic proportions. Hopefully more of the latter. [This Is My Next, All Things D]