Article Suggests Mismanagement Doomed WebOS from the Start

A recent article in The New York Times took a deep dive into the world of HP, Palm and webOS. The wild ride this mobile platform has taken thus far has been bumpy, but as it turns out, some believe it was doomed from the start. Read on for an inside look into why webOS is likely to become complete vaporware in no time at all …

The New York Times wasted no time getting to the straight talk:

Palm’s apparent strength, and subsequent weakness, was that the webOS operating system was built on WebKit on top of Linux. And while WebKit offered the promise of an open and wonderful ecosystem, the proliferation and subsequent implementation wasn’t exactly stellar. When things went south, HP bought Palm on the promise of a new webOS future. But the reality of that promise, as we know, was broken.

What’s interesting is the concept of webOS might have worked if Palm hadn’t cut corners. According to the Times, an inside source claimed:

That is an incredibly short amount of time for a brand new platform. Android existed in development for quite some time before Google even took an interest in it and Apple developed iOS as an offshoot of OS X for an extended period of time before putting it on a phone.

According to the article, instead of building a solid foundation for the webOS applications and associated APIs (like Apple/Google has), Palm asked each application to be built from “scratch.” The result apparently became unmanageable, as Palm and then HP both reshaped the way application development on the webOS platform was handled. Compounding the situation, according to The Times, Google hired away most of the people who had a good understanding of how to build things with WebKit and webOS. As a result, HP wouldn’t (and couldn’t) invest the time and resources needed to make a potentially flawed OS something useful, and as a result, the platform failed.

Bottom line? The article seems to confirms many sentiments that turning webOS into an open source project is a way to put webOS out to pasture without burning the potential it could have as a resource or reference platform. But The Times article also suggests — with good reason — that webOS is likely to fade into the background as one of the tech industry’s greatest failures. The best we can take from it are the talents of developers and lessons about platform proliferation. The rest, is truly history.

For 2012, I’m officially declaring webOS dead. We’ll miss you.