This just might be a counter balance to Apple’s dominance of the “highly mobile” device market—iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad—a dominance further supported by a massive lead in apps that run on such devices. Unlike Microsoft, Google and Amazon, HP is now the one company capable of creating a fully integrated hardware and operating system platform with the scale and experience to make it work.
A few observations:
Watch for Amazon to create a Kindle for webOS reader. This is a natural and Amazon has shown that their main objective is selling media—the dedicated Kindle reader is a means to an end.
A loser here is Microsoft who desperately wants to make Windows 7 a standard on tablet computers that compete with iPad. They just might have to go it alone by creating their own hardware a la Amazon (Kindle) or Google (Nexus One), or double-down on their Kin-branded mobile phones.
A wild card is what HP will do with their upcoming tablet, the HP Slate, which will run Windows 7. Will they have a webOS version? A separate hardware line? Drop Windows 7? Regardless, media developers will have two good choices for distributing their media.
HP may not have the cache (or Steve Jobs), but they do have the marketing dollars and manufacturing experience Palm sorely lacked.
Good news for media developers, HP buys Palm
A few observations:
Watch for Amazon to create a Kindle for webOS reader. This is a natural and Amazon has shown that their main objective is selling media—the dedicated Kindle reader is a means to an end.
A loser here is Microsoft who desperately wants to make Windows 7 a standard on tablet computers that compete with iPad. They just might have to go it alone by creating their own hardware a la Amazon (Kindle) or Google (Nexus One), or double-down on their Kin-branded mobile phones.
A wild card is what HP will do with their upcoming tablet, the HP Slate, which will run Windows 7. Will they have a webOS version? A separate hardware line? Drop Windows 7? Regardless, media developers will have two good choices for distributing their media.
HP may not have the cache (or Steve Jobs), but they do have the marketing dollars and manufacturing experience Palm sorely lacked.