HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU

Re:HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU by j_col on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @04:46AM (#3016841)

As a Touchpad and Pre3 user, I can honestly say that these guys done a great job in delivering these devices (I love them both, yes I am a long-suffering webOS fanboy), and this is a terrible reward for all of their hard work. Wish them all well in their post-HP lives.

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Re:HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU by SkyMarshal on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @10:52AM (#3017764)

"and this is a terrible reward for all of their hard work."

Don't cry for them too hard, Argentina. I know one of them, they have a severence coming which I believe was part of the deal when HP bought them - cancel Palm/WebOS, lay us off, and we get paid. It'll buy a lot of them time to think about what's next and hopefully start some cool new startups that inherit what they've learned and done over the years.

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Re:HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU by hvs on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @09:52AM (#3017505)

Unfortunately, "hard work" is not something that inherently deserves a reward (or is it its own reward?) in the business world. You can work really hard on the wrong thing. I hope the developers were compensated well for putting out a good product, but I wouldn't associate their getting laid off with how hard they worked, but that the company miscalculated.

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Re:HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU by j_col on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @10:15AM (#3017605)

I agree that you can work really hard on the wrong thing, but in my opinion the Pre3 and the Touchpad are the right thing (and I'm not alone in this). The reasons why they didn't sell (in my opinion) are that they were priced wrong on the initial release, the marketing was poor to non-existent (in the case of Europe for example, where there was no marketing), and finally they were just not given enough of a chance (who cancels a new device about a month after it is released? And in the case of the Pre3 it was never released outside of Europe...).

All of these things are the fault of strategic management at HP, not the hardware engineers who are losing their jobs.

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Re:HP to lay off as many as 525 at webOS GBU by jackson71 on Tuesday September 20, 2011 @01:25PM (#3018548)

The Pre3 and the Touchpad are the right thing? They may have been the right thing in HP/Palm's eyes at the time, but they're dead now. Flatlined. Time to let go.

I hope the hardware engineers land on their feet at other companies, but I have a hard time believing for a moment that 525 folks comprised the Hardware division alone and nobody else was caught up in this. Developer Relations and webOS Development seems to have escaped the axe this time, but if I were working there I'd be looking over my shoulder more than a couple times a day.

Unless webOS gets a new lease on life through either a coherent strategy or new hardware licensees (preferably both) VERY soon, it's dead. They had one massive dry spell during the transition to HP that killed what market share and most of the developer mindshare they had; they're not going to make it through another one and have both consumers and developers give it yet another chance. All but the most dedicated webOS developers have already left as it is.

My prediction: Once the CM7 (Android Gingerbread) port hits, most of the people who bought the Touchpad at firesale will evaporate away from webOS along with whatever developer revenue was left to be had, dual-boot or not. webOS will end up an embedded OS for menu-driven appliances and other applications of their ilk, but never see another non-enterprise consumer mobile device again.

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