HP open-sources webOS

I have to confess I didn't see this one coming!

I was fairly sure that the most likely outcome of HP's strategic review of webOS under Meg Whitman would be to keep it for their "other" products — printers, basically. Second most likely was, I thought, a trade sale to someone who might want their own OS and had the resources — of talent, money and time — to really make something of it; Amazon perhaps (although that boat has likely sailed), Barnes and Noble maybe if they really had the cash (as it might provide a way out of their patent spat with Microsoft), or one of the Chinese telecom companies or tablet manufacturers.

But it was not to be. Presumably HP explored the possibility of a trade sale, and either found that there were no realistic buyers, or decided that there was a better option.

One fascinating possibility is that open sourcing webOS really is the best option. Certainly, this way HP can continue to use it for their non-personal equipment, so it's at least as good as the first possibility raised above. Second, if HP really do continue to invest time and energy developing it, as they apparently are promising to do then I'd be surprised if the likes of Barnes and Noble, Amazon, yes and even Samsung, HTC and (whisper it!) Nokia don't at least take a very careful look at what's suddenly become available. There's a whole class of Android manufacturers who are chafing at being beholden to Google, at having to take Google cloud apps and Google search services, at taking their turns to be picked for the year's Google phone — and it's the big boys who feel this most keenly, not the also rans.

One has to feel that maybe HP have found a revenue stream here. Not from the OS itself, because they've just open sourced it, and not from any associated cloud services or app store because HP don't have them, but from something that's becoming of looming importance now: patents. Dangle an open source webOS as bait, and then sell the patent protection necessary to actually use it to the manufacturers who pick it up. There's a distinct possibility of cramping Android's style with that strategy.

A lot depends of course, on the details. On the open source community's acceptance of webOS as a living platform for one thing: it has to be a project with lots of vitality, like the Linux kernel; it mustn't fall into navel-gazing and obscurantism, like Mozilla. On the specifics of what HP contributes and what it doesn't, for another: an OS kit that can't actually run on anything without substantial and undocumented porting effort would be of benefit to few.

Update
Reading around the web, most pundits seem to favour the cynical interpretation: HP are just using the fig-leaf of open-source to dump webOS without actually having to admit that they are doing so. Comments (to these sorts of article) are a different matter though, with many people making the point that, irrespective of HP's own motivations, the future of webOS (or parts of it) may still be somewhat bright.

HP, Apotheker, Whitman — the saga continues

The latest news from HP, that the board is supposedly going to fire Leo Apotheker after only eleven months in the job, and install Meg Whitman as the new CEO, is making me very nervous about my Autonomy shares.

I was flummoxed to receive a letter from my dealers stating that the first deadline for acceptances had passed with only 46% of holders accepting, since I had assumed that UK institutional investors, long famed on the boards for their apathy towards AU, would have cashed out at the first opportunity, especially since the offer is widely seen as being an overpayment. I guess the art of brinkmanship is not lost. We'll see, the next deadline is 3rd October, and I think there's another, final one on the 17th or thereabouts.

Gossip on the boards is frenzied right now, with some even speculating on an HP/SAP merger: the rationale being that if HP are indeed moving to be an enterprise software company, they would still lack a big-hitter product even after the AU purchase. SAP would, of course, fit that bill.

I think Larry Ellison would relish the role of Wicked Fairy at that particular wedding. I have no doubt that the M&A specialists at Oracle are even now casting their eyes over HP and running the numbers. A further fall in its share price (already down 47% since Leo came aboard), as might well accompany a bid for SAP, would only make it more vulnerable.

There are other attractions for Larry, besides the pure pleasure of sacking the HP board en masse and putting his mate Mark Hurd back in the CEO's seat. He bought Sun for Java, not for its hardware business, but the addition of HP's Unix server business (and the re-introduction of the Oracle database on those servers) would please HP's midrange customers and add to the critical mass of Oracle's Unix business. If the worst came to the worst, he could perhaps simply shift some proportion of HP customers over to Sun kit the hard way, by simply (over time) raising HP prices faster (even) than Sun's, but there's no need at all to be so cavalier. He could kill Itanium after the next two, contracted-for, revisions by simply failing to extend HP's contracts with Intel, and have HP engineers in the meantime scurry to port HP-UX to SPARC, while scheduling new Superdome SPARC cells for some time around 2015. Any remaining HP IP in Itanium might be a useful addition to SPARC, and increased volume couldn't hurt. If he's as neutral on Sun's x86 business as he says he is, he could complete the spinoff of HP's PC division while throwing in Sun's x86 business as a sweetener. What he'd do with WebOS is anyone's guess.

Well that's enough wild imaginings and uninformed speculation for one night.

HP, PCs, WebOS and Autonomy

The most amazing feeling, yesterday evening, of having fallen through the mirror into a bizzaro world where America is Europe, Apotheker is Elop and HP is Nokia. It's as though the Americans, unwilling to countenance a strong European player in the mobile phone industry, sent in Elop to administer the coup de grâce to Nokia, and now the Europeans have done the same to one of their industry giants in retaliation.

The feeling only intensified as I read through the details, noting the similarity of the arguments advanced for the decision, and the strange way that they both actually seem to be doing the very opposite of what they are saying. Let me explain.

With regards to Nokia, I was struck by Elop's statement that he wanted to move to a software platform that had a large "ecosystem" — shorthand I suppose for a large developer base *and* a large user base. Struck, because he promptly ignored the platform that had the largest ecosystem, Android (iOS not being an option for him, naturally), and chose the one that had if anything the smallest ecosystem, Winpho 7. Similarly, he said he wanted the platform that would best allow Nokia to distinguish its offerings from the herd — by which he undoubtedly meant the host of manufacturers offering Android based phones — but he ignored the fact that one of the reasons that those manufacturers love Android is precisely because it is so customisable, being open-source (think MotoBlur, HTC Sense, TouchWiz, ...), whereas Microsoft puts stringent compatibility and design requirements on manufacturers who want to use Winpho 7.

I still think that Nokia might have done better to dump Maemo/MeeGo while retaining its Qt-based presentation layer (the GUI, Touch UI, whatever you want to call it, and the user-facing apps), and to graft that onto Android, completely replacing Android's current, Java/Dalvik-based presentation layer and apps. That way Nokia would be absolved from any responsibility for developing the lower layers of the stack, which clearly Google are making a very good job of, and could concentrate their efforts on the UI layers and on tying the apps to Nokia's services. Indeed, given their current woes with Oracle, Google also might one day have been better off if Nokia had done that, since they would presumably have open sourced the code as they were doing with MeeGo. But I digress.

With respect to HP, Apotheker says he wants to move away from hardware and towards software as an engine for growth. So ... he dumps their biggest software asset, the proprietary WebOS...??? He blames the slowdown in the PC market on what he calls the "tablet effect", but clearly it's not just any old tablets, otherwise HP's own offerings would be doing much better: it's just *Apple's* tablets that are doing so well, and Apple's tablets run ... the proprietary iOS! And what was it, Leo, that has made Apple's operating system such a big deal? Why, it's the number of phones and tablets they've sold that run it! HP's PCs represented an excellent vector for insinuating WebOS into the market — as a quick-boot solution for those wanting just to browse the web and do emails for example — and WebOS represented HP's best bet for locking users into its software and services, as well as its hardware.

It's very odd. In the past decades, HP has steadily moved away from anything that required unique or original abilities in its labour force. It makes standard Windows PCs, and it's outsourced their manufacturing to the Far East. In recent years even the proportion of HP-specific design in its products has gone down — Asus design HP's PC motherboards for example. Apple on the other hand has gone in just the opposite direction. After the debacles of the old Mac OS and the Power Macs, Apple had to violently alter course and jump onto a bog standard Unix-like OS and bog standard Intel chips. Since then they've added customisation after customisation to their OS, moving it ever further away from its open source roots, and now they are designing their own ARM-based processors which it looks very likely they will soon be using in desktops and laptops. Every move they make is designed to increase user lock-in to their platform, while reducing the likelihood that their suppliers will be able to reverse engineer and mimic their offerings.

At least I have something to thank HP for. No one has less confidence in Autonomy than the UK stock market's institutional players, and my 125 shares were showing a rather large net loss at close of business last night, after the general market landslide during the day, and on top of accumulated slippage over the past few months. Now that's all transformed and my investment is showing a lovely 55% gain. Thank you so much HP, may your every endeavour be crowned with success!