Showing posts with label WebOS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WebOS. Show all posts

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Should Amazon Buy Palm?

Amazon is rumored to be in “serious negotiations to buy Palm assets from HP. Some will question whether this makes sense for Amazon. Palm's webOS has been highly regarded, but has failed to get market traction.

Whether Amazon could do better, or whether it should not simply continue to use Android, are legitimate questions. But some might argue most of the value is in Palm's intellectual property portfolio.

And that could be important if Amazon believes it will, in the future, be competing with Apple, not with Barnes & Noble or eBay. As recent events have shown, IP ownership is crucial in the new mobile business.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Amazon to buy WebOS?

Amazon is rumored to be among the top contenders to buy WebOS from Hewlett-Packard. The obvious application would be the 10-inch tablet Amazon is expected to develop.

The Kindle Fire is powered by Android, but it’s been heavily customized by Amazon to the point where you can barely tell, some would argue. Other players in the device business have reasons to create an ecosystem of products unified around a single operating system, Apple being the classic example.

But there has been a rapid trend towards operating system fragmentation recently, with major smart phone suppliers deciding they must own both their operating system and hardware to compete at the top levels globally, in both smart phones and tablets.

Amazon might believe it needs a similar degree of uniqueness for its larger-screen devices that might function less as e-readers and more as full-fledged tablets.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

WebOS Coming to Slates and Printers - HP CEO

Hewlett-Packard has said it would leverage Palm's WebOS for additional devices such as tablet devices and printers, and HP CEO Mark Hurd has confirmed exactly that. HP “expects to leverage WebOS into a variety of form factors, including slates and Web-connected printers."

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Palm in "Death Spiral"?

"Death spiral" is not a word any company executive ever hopes to see or hear in the same sentence as the firm name. But that's what Barron writer Eric Savitz now does. "I fear Palm has begun sliding into a death spiral," he says. "Palm is simply too small, too poor and too weak to compete in a market where some of the world's most powerful companies are vying for supremacy."

Though its competitors will not lament the potential loss of one contestant in the market, the webOS software Palm developed also is described by Savitz as "brilliant." Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal in a review last summer called the Pre "potentially the strongest rival to the iPhone to date."

"There's just one problem: No one is buying the phones," he says. Palm now says revenue for its fiscal year, ending in May, will be well below its previous forecast of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion. The problem, Palm said, is "slower than expected consumer adoption of the company's products." In other words, the Pixi and the Pre aren't selling.

Whether Palm somehow can pull off a turn-around is not clear, nor is it clear whether the company will wind up being sold to another firm. But webOS is yet another illustration of the fact that in the technology business, the "best" product does not always win.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

App Stores Very Valuable for Handset Suppliers and Users; Maybe Not Developers

App stores have been a huge boost to smartphone perceived value. What they haven't yet proven is that they are an effective way for software developers to sell applications.

About 80 percent to 90 percent of app downloads are of the "free" rather than "paid" variety, according to AdMob.

"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"

Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...