According to AppleInsider HP is rumored to have finished the initial bidding process for its webOS unit and will hold an all-hands meeting tomorrow that may reveal its future plans for selling or spinning off the group, according to people familiar with the company's plans.
HP appeared to be clearly uninterested in investing the capital needed to launch webOS as a major competitor to Apple's iOS, Google's Android, RIM's BlackBerry OS and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platforms; such a task would be very difficult even if HP made it a company priority.
While webOS is now largely finished and its hardware was ready to sell, HP's cancelation of the hardware side of the equation, motivated by dismal sales, means that a spinoff of Palm would result in a return to square one for the group, forcing it to formulate a new licensing business in a market where even Microsoft has had a very difficult time assembling a viable ecosystem of mobile licensees.
That makes the most likely outcome for webOS a direct sale to a third party (such as Amazon) that wants to own its own mobile environment without having to start from scratch.
HP's PSG has also completed work on the Enyo development framework for webOS, which could be used by either an existing mobile platform or by a software vendor to create web-based software for existing platforms.
Source: AppleInsider
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