ReadWriteWeb

This week, Hewlett-Packard announced the open source roadmap for webOS along with the next edition of its application framework, Enyo 2.0. As we wrote yesterday, the time for webOS to shine may lie ahead. What it comes down to is how well the open source community responds to webOS and whether or not the original equipment manufacturers will ever decide to build webOS devices.

The favorable response of the community and OEMs is not guaranteed. Many think webOS is as dead an operating system as Aramaic is a language. That may include former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein who is leaving HP after his commitment to the company elapsed. Is there still potential for webOS and Enyo or have we seen the last of the once-promising mobile operating system? That is the topic of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced the open source roadmap for its beleaguered mobile platform webOS. This is HP's last-ditch attempt to actually turn webOS into a viable product after it acquired Palm in April 2010. It looks like the rebuilt source code for webOS will not be ready until September as HP takes the long view of the platform. Yet, when webOS is ready for prime time again, it may be just in time to take advantage of some of the deep current flowing through the mobile ecosystem.

Hewlett-Packard has finally had enough with trying to figure out what to do with its failed acquisition of mobile platform webOS. So, it is doing the easiest thing possible to get out from under the burden of supporting the platform: turning it loose to the open source community.

In its press release announcing the open sourcing of webOS, HP said all the right things. It will continue to invest and be an active participant. It will provide inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation. It will be purely open source. Those almost seems to be conflicting statements. HP may think that it is trying to create a new Android ecosystem, but HP and Google's approaches to mobile are going in opposite directions.

It's no surprise that the new-and-re-improved Hewlett-Packard has come to the conclusion this afternoon, under newly-minted President and CEO Meg Whitman, that it will not spin off the Personal Systems Group (PSG) division responsible for producing PCs and tablets. This move was announced after the close of stock trading Thursday afternoon.

But one of the first questions analysts asked during an HP investors' press conference this afternoon was the fate of its tablet unit. Today, Whitman made it absolutely clear that any tablet PCs HP may produce in the coming year will center around Windows 8, not the webOS platform that HP acquired in the Palm buyout just over one year ago.

Editor's note: This is an op-ed.

I woke up on Sunday and started fussing about the apartment. Made a cup of tea, cleaned the kitchen, turned on the Roku and sat down on my couch with my iPad to check the news.

That is when I saw that HP had turned the TouchPad into a fire sale.

Tablets priced at $99 flying off the shelves and what had been a significant headline on Tuesday (Best Buy has 250,000 unsold TouchPads) had completely turned around on Sunday (Good Luck Finding a $99 TouchPad). It got me to thinking. As much as consumers love their Apple products and the iPad is a terrific device, consumers want something that is price efficient, even if it is a touch flawed. With literally hundreds of thousands of TouchPads sold over the weekend, a significant note should be playing in retailers' and manufacturers' heads - opportunities await for those willing to make a sacrifice.

One day after Hewlett-Packard announced that it will be suspending the production of webOS-based phones and tablets, news has surfaced that members the webOS team itself had misgivings about the TouchPad hardware on which it was running.

The promising mobile operating system is said to have run twice as fast when loaded onto Apple's iPad 2 tablet compared to when it was running on the TouchPad hardware on which it was sold to consumers, according to The Next Web. WebOS reportedly ran considerably better in the iPad's Web browser than it did natively on the TouchPad.

The rate at which data, or content, is being produced for the Web and being generated for businesses has outpaced the rate at which conventional databases are evolving to better manage it all. It's a fact of life that we perceive on a gradual basis every day, but that we haven't yet acknowledged to be as significant or dangerous a trend as it is: Data is getting slower. Networks are getting bigger as the cloud is getting broader, and data that was already difficult to manage is becoming impossible. Content management systems today continue to be based on the types of structured database systems about one or two steps more evolved than dBASE. We've known they would be insufficient for the task, but we've put off the problem of composing a new architecture.

It's already too late for major IT companies to start that new architecture from square one; if a company has any hope of addressing this colossal, underappreciated problem, it will need to acquire the architectural project in progress. This is what Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it intends to do: acquire a software firm whose core product aims to supplant everything we know about databases, both the SQL kind and the Google kind. In its place would come a clustered approach whose goal is no less than to be the central repository for meaning in the world.

And in exchange for this, HP is willing to let go of the promise of Palm.

Hewlett-Packard released its quarterly earning statement today and tucked in the middle of the press release was a little bombshell: "HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward."

As they say, another one bites the dust. Or does it?

HP is getting out of the mobile hardware business. This comes a week after Nokia said that it would discontinue Symbian phones in the U.S. In reality this does not change the U.S. (or global) mobile ecosystem at all. WebOS had almost no market share despite the fact that it is a well-made operating system from a once popular mobile vendor. Palm could not support it and HP cannot market it. News surfaced yesterday that Best Buy has 250,000 HP TouchPads (the tablet based on webOS) sitting in stock that it cannot get rid of. Yet, what exactly does it mean for HP to "continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward"?

With Google's takeover of Motorola, a lot of the focus has been on how it will affect the Android ecosystem. Google claims that nothing will really change and that Android will remain open and free to its partners. The major Android partners seemingly agree that the Google is doing the right thing to "defend Android." Yet, what is said by corporate CEOs reacting to big news and what is reality six months or a year down the line are two separate things. Doors may open for Android original equipment manufacturers to get off the Android crack and diversify their mobile portfolios. This could create an opening for Windows Phone 7, as many have mentioned. It also could be a big opportunity for Hewlett-Packard. The answer? License WebOS.

HP bought Palm and WebOS for $1.2 billion last year. Since then it has floundered in HP developer purgatory and then released to a couple handsets and the HP TouchPad, a tablet of mediocre quality. That does not mean that WebOS is a dud. Palm had an operating system of equal (and in many ways superior) quality to both iOS and Android. It lacked marketing power and the ability to get developers on board to create a vibrant application ecosystem. This has not changed under HP. Yet, with Android OEMs now casting a wary eye on Google/Motorola (which I shall refer to as MotoGoo) and HP realizing that it has absolutely no market clout with WebOS, there may be an opportunity to resurrect one of the original smartphone operating systems.

It pains me to say this, as I was very excited to try HP's TouchPad, but the combination of the webOS mobile operating system packaged in the form factor of the TouchPad tablet is far from being any sort of iPad killer. That's not to say that webOS doesn't have its perks - for example, the fast app switching involving stacks of "cards" you can swipe through on the homescreen, system-wide notifications that appear at the top right with just the right amount of interruption, a nifty "touch to share" feature that lets you move content between a Palm Pre and TouchPad.

But everything that's great about webOS comes in a heavy, chunky, plastic-y and cheap feeling TouchPad. It's a disappointing experience that detracts from the great features of the operating system. And this is only one of the problems with the tablet - it also has issues with its Web browser, Flash, a still paltry app catalog and more.