It’s been a rough ride for webOS of recent times. But despite the OS continuing to survive, HP has decided to ditch a large chunk of it’s development team.
Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple exec, godfather of webOS and CEO of Palm, has left HP, reports AllThingsD. The move isn’t too surprising as the writing has been on the wall since he left HP’s Palm unit last summer to move to a lesser role at HP’s Personal Systems Group.
When HP kinda, sorta killed webOS as a money making endeavour, they promised to keep it alive as an open source project, but offered little in the way of concrete details. According to The Verge they’ve partially pulled back the curtain, revealing that Open webOS 1.0 should arrive in September.
We’re all well aware of the commercial problems that HP has endured with WebOS. But now, according to the New York Times, insiders have admitted that the software was doomed from the get-go.
WebOS still has a pulse! The mobile OS seemingly doomed to a cold eternity in a digital graveyard has been granted an open source reprieve. Great! Only question is, what comes next?
John Kneeland does not have an easy job at the moment. John Kneeland is probably nervous about his career every morning. John Kneeland is probably worried about the future right now. John Kneeland works in HP’s maybe-dead WebOS division.
So much news passes before our collective eyes every day that we couldn’t possibly cover it all. Mostly because much of it isn’t worth covering! But here are a some borderline tidbits we passed on, just in case.
HP is all but done with webOS, rumoured to be in talks with potential buyers. However, a sale hasn’t happened yet because it’s still deluding itself into thinking people care about seeing a linux-based mobile OS on a printer.
HP’s earnings were brutal this past quarter, sure. In response, new CEO Meg Whitman’s clarion call to investors, repeated over and over again? We need to be more clear. We need to let you know what’s going on.
