When HP acquired Palm, everyone was hoping to see new form of webOS and its features in the new gadgets. Then, HP came up with the TouchPad tablet based on webOS, and it was widely reported as an iPad 2 killer.
Just after the five months of announcement, HP has officially killed the webOS project and now it will not produce any new devices running on this operating system. So, why did they suddenly shock customers with such news? Obviously, the products weren’t profitable as their desktop PCs or laptops.
HP’s webOS project didn’t work in the tech world, but there are some genuine reasons behind the failure. As industry people said, there was nothing wrong in the OS. It’s the strategy of the company that went wrong in almost all the sections.
Competitors
Apple and Google have captured most of the mobile phone and tablet market in recent years. And now, it has become very difficult to steal some percent of market share from these two companies. Even the popular company in the PC world, Microsoft, is struggling to grab top place in the mobile business.
As far as HP is concerned, it could have done much better with webOS. The company was slowly entering into the tablet field for the first time with relatively new OS, and it takes time for a new product to make impact on users. Perhaps, HP was expecting quick success like Apple’s iPad from its webOS devices.
Leadership
Companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have got great industry leaders who can motivate employees to work passionately on the projects. In case of HP, we haven’t heard about any inspirational or charismatic person working with the webOS team. It is also being said that the people working on this project were unaware of the strange decision taken by the board of directors, which shows the communication level between the company and developers’ team.
Promotional Strategies
Apple’s all products are doing well because the company has strong support from media and bloggers and therefore, they don’t put a lot of money on advertising and marketing. On the other hand, HP is not a ‘media friendly’ company. We hardly see bloggers or enthusiasts writing about HP’s products on daily basis.
Though HP’s webOS gadgets have got decent remarks from top reviewers, the only thing that they ever needed was a powerful promotional campaign.
However, the company did put some initial efforts in marketing TouchPad tablets and eventually it got good response from users for a shorter period.
Third Party Developers
If you have something to offer, people will come to you. The webOS project was not as popular as iOS or Android, and that’s the reason why developers have never shown much interest in the development of webOS apps.
HP could have encouraged third party developers to build interesting apps for its software, but again they didn’t put enough efforts in attracting such developers.
Software Updates
When you launch a new gadget and expect users to buy it for the certain price, it’s your duty to provide technical support to them. HP launched TouchPad and other mobile phones with very high expectations, but users never received any major software update on their devices.
Now that they have declared the discontinuation of entire webOS project, users will not receive updates from the company. So if you have bought a webOS phone or tablet few days before the announcement, you have no other option than dealing with current bugs and errors.