HP to buy Palm: Now the hard part

    “This seems like a good deal for both parties,” Gowalla CEO Josh Williams wrote me. “webOS is an elegant mobile operating system and personally I still believe it can have a bright future. Though its reputation has dropped off as of late, HP has a history in the mobile device space with the iPAQ and other products, and I'm in hopes that they'll put the resources behind this marriage to make it a success. As developers, we'll keep an eye on this closely. I'd say we're cautiously optimistic.”

A path to success

    What can HP do to make this work?

    The safest, most diplomatic route would be to keep offering all of its mobile platforms and sub-brands even after buying Palm. As it stands, HP is Microsoft’s biggest customer (thanks to its top-ranked PCs and huge server business); if it were to ditch Microsoft’s mobile products altogether, there would be painful weeping and gnashing of teeth in Redmond. On the Linux front, HP engineers have invested a lot of time developing HP’s offering, and any effort to move away from them would ignite internal squabbles. Finally, HP calculators are their own quaint little niche, even though calculator software running on Apple and Google platforms is improving rapidly.

    But if HP allows Palm and its webOS to end up as just another option in its mobile software toolbox, it will be a big mistake. Not only would that send a mixed message to consumers and developers, HP’s own finite marketing and engineering resources will be spread too thin.

    Instead, HP should commit to migrating all of its mobile products to webOS – and to using the Palm brand across as many of them as possible. That would not only bring an impressive base of consumers and business users to webOS, but also focus HP’s internal software developers on providing a powerful base of apps for home and office. HP’s hardware engineers could focus on building interfaces to work with one OS. And that simplicity and unit volume would encourage third-party developers to commit to webOS.

    If Bradley does that, he and his proven team have a real shot at making this the biggest mobile buy ever, and going toe-to-toe with Apple and Google. If not, expect both the Palm brand and the webOS platform to sink into the abyss – probably for the last time.