Open webOS Is For Consumers

Fulfilling Open Source Promise – HP Is Hiring 50+ Developers For WebOS

I’m glad to read that, but the TechCrunch analysis is plain screwy:

But what will HP do with it in the end? As The Powerbase points out, let’s just hope that HP is not foolish enough to put WebOS back into the consumer market.

The future of WebOS is in the enterprise. The market is not sewn up. Apple has taken a good lead but the company is not committed to making an enterprise play. The Android platform is fractured, RIM is all but dead and Android is too fractured.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

That’s just nuts.

Innovation does not come from the Enterprise. It comes from the Consumer market.

Did Jobs for one moment ever consider making the iPhone for the Enterprise? No. And can you argue with the money Apple has made? Apple didn’t even give in to Enterprise security demands and release an iPhone model without a camera.

Go show me all the Android phones that are targeted at the Enterprise. None are. Sure, Google bought up QuickOffice, which lets people use several Microsoft file formats. But so what? Classic Palm OS PDAs were using that software first.

It’s been only Blackberry that has explicitly targeted the Enterprise. And what shape are they in today? On life support! They found out that Enterprises are composed of people — and those people bought their own damn iPhones to use at work.

I have been working on a very, very long post about how Open webOS is the future everyone will flock to. There are several real-world lines converging that all point to Open webOS as our future salvation (and I don’t use that word lightly). The Enterprise doesn’t figure in any of that future because it’s the Consumer market that drives the world of tech, not the Enterprise. (And if you don’t believe that, you don’t understand the history of desktop computing at all. Here, let me help you.)

And as for HP, it just has no place in the future of Open webOS. HP dumped it. And it will never, ever get it back.