I don’t have much to say about the demise of HP Touchpad/webOS– I haven’t used it much, or played with it unless there was a demo unit set up in at a store. What I did see was interesting, and likely more of a victim of coming to market when they are a glut of new OS’s. This release time was likely one of the reasons that the PalmPRE struggled.

From my outsider view, I do think RIM should have bought Palm for webOS (or been more agressive about it).  I also think Google should look at what happened here, as webOS purchase by HP was very much a move of HP from being primary hardware to being both hardware and software. Similar pressures will be put on Google with its recent purchase of Motorola.

What I found interesting though was how the story broke on the Silicon Alley Insider throughout the day. Here are the headlines and the times posted (as indicated on the article):

5:24 AM HP needs to buy RIM now or shut down Palm

10:22 AM HP may expand webOS to cars and kitchen appliances

12:10 PM HP ready to spin out its PC Business (and become a software company)

3:12 PM HP killing the Touchpad and other WebOS devices

3:54 PM Time for Facebook to buy webOS from HP for a couple of bucks

4:57 PM HP looks like it wants to sell webOS rather than license it

6:31 PM HP to employees we’re not walking away from webOS

So we went from editorals suggesting that HP needs to buy a major hardware manufacture, to how it will expand its OS to different markets, to rumor of shutting down its hardware arm, than killing of it during thier conference call. I really find it interesting how the story progressed, changed and envolved during the day.

I know the story was more about the hardware that ran webOS versus the actual webOS, but I think that in the current market the line that seperates these two groupings is awfully thin.