Remember when HP bought Palm in 2010? And remember when HP killed webOS little over a year later in August? Ah, good times.
Well, it turns out that HP is looking to close the chapter that is Palm and webOS for good, with a report from Reuters saying that they are looking to sell the webOS unit for “hundreds of millions of dollars,” which isn’t surprising given the recent events.
The currently rumoured candidates for the purchase are Oracle, where Mark Hurd, who bought Palm when he was in charge of HP, now resides, Amazon, Research In Motion, IBM, and Intel, but these could be wrong or change at any minute.
When HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion dollars in April of 2010 things looked fairly bright for the company. Palm seemed lost in the new age of smartphones and with little resources, a fairly nice OS but fairly bad hardware, HP sounded like the perfect company for them. Sadly, HP didn’t feel that way and ran webOS into the ground with more subpar hardware and stupid business decisions, as well as not building and refining the OS.
I really hope that when HP does eventually sell the OS and hardware, which they will, the new owner will have actually thought out the purchase and have a role for the company that has made some innovative decisions along with dumb ones. Or history could just repeat itself.