Last week, the big American PC and server manufacturer HP announced that it's to withdraw from the PC, Tablet and Mobile market and sell that part of its business.
In a way, there's nothing that surprising about this: IBM did a similar thing a few years ago, which is why you now see Lenovo ThankPads rather than IBM ThinkPads. PCs are a very low margin business.
What is interesting is that a little over a year ago, HP bought out Palm, the people behind the original handheld PDA (remember the PalmPilot?). Their main reason was to acquire webOS, Palm's platform for mobiles. The concept behind webOS was that the user interface should work in the same way as a web browser, and apps should be coded using web technologies. Palm believed that the future lay in using web technologies for other things, like mobile apps which should work just as well without a connection as with one.
In that respsect they were prescient. I've blogged about this before. A world in which, as an app developer, you only have to build one version (rather than ones for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia etc), and in which you sell your app and any content with it just with a URL and without having to pay a middle-man a cut is far more appealing than the currect fragmented scenario. Indeed, Amazon have thrown down the gauntlet by releasing their 'Kindle Cloud Reader', an e-reader which allows you to download your Kindle library to your web browser and read it offline. It works every bit as well as their Android and iPhone apps, allows them to circumvent Apple's 30% charge for in-app purchases and is very much a statement from an industry thought leader that this is the way of the future. And let's not forget Microsoft's plans for an HTML5/Javascript app store for Windows 8.
The reason HP have decided to ditch their investment in Palm and webOS is, paradoxically, the same reason webOS was such an innovative product in the first place. The world is moving towards web apps, so platform is less important. This makes it far harder to differentiate the product. And while we're still in transition from 'native' apps, iOS, Android and Blackberry all have much healthier app stores.
The problem is that Palm, the original innovators whose influence can be seen all over the way you interact with an iPhone or iPad, just didn't have the cachet of Apple, the sheer force of Google or even the slow drip that led to Blackberry's success. It's a market that is increasingly (despite the bumbling attempts of Microsoft and Nokia) converging on three platforms: iOS, Blackberry and Android. It's not hugely disimilar from the Mac vs PC situration that has dominated the PC market for years, you might think.
There's are a couple of important differences though. The first is that the emergence of HTML5 and web apps à la Kindle Cloud Reader that work offline means that the type of operating system that runs your tablet is less important. There will be no equivalent to "well we need to run XYZ so we need Windows". The second key fact is that while Microsoft was always a software vendor with an interest in locking people in to Microsoft products, the modern day equivalent in mobile, Google, is not. Google runs on advertising revenue, so you can be sure it will find a way that web app developers can include Google ads in their apps no matter what platform they run on. And Google also has a history of encouraging and leading innovation in the web arena. So the upshot of all of this is that, once the world has moved away from native to web apps, which I think will take about 5 years, there will then be the space for someone to come in with a really revolutionary design for a mobile operating system which takes full of advantage of all of this.
And what of webOS? Well unfortunately it will go the way of many products that were ahead of their time and couldn't gain market traction, and either find itself a small niche somewhere or be left to die. Which is unfortunate because it could have been well placed to ride the web app wave.
