Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 100 posts

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#71

Post by w33ble »

j_col wrote: post #19
modeless wrote: post #14

What would Amazon do with WebOS when they have already invested so much in Android? Switching would require them to abandon the app store they built. The Silk browser seems at odds with how WebOS works. All their Android UI customizations would have to be rewritten.

Look at it this way: their are about 1 million Touchpad users already out their due to the HP firesale. That's a nice market to buy, considering these people will want to upgrade to something in 12-18 months time, while keeping their profiles and all of the webOS software they bought (the app market in webOS land is thriving by the way since the massive influx of new users). I think whatever software work they would…

I don't buy that they are buying user profiles. The ability to run WebOS apps on the Kindle would be interesting, but buying such a small app market and spending the extra money to integrate it, I don't know if I buy that. And a complete move the WebOS? Abandoning the people who bought in to the Amazon App Store? No way. Moving to WebOS and making that able to run Android apps makes more sense, but I still don't see any incentive there. The Fire will be a huge success, and it looks like it works pretty good out of the box, and that should only improve with time. Why would they bother to start over with a move to WebOS?

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#72

Post by wanorris »

wheels wrote: post #40
modeless wrote: post #14

What would Amazon do with WebOS when they have already invested so much in Android? Switching would require them to abandon the app store they built. The Silk browser seems at odds with how WebOS works. All their Android UI customizations would have to be rewritten.

My guess is a bunch of embedded Linux hackers and a large patent portfolio, which relative other vendors they're quite short on. Maybe webOS would be recycled as an OS for the ePaper products or something, but I wouldn't bet on its future even if it does go over to Amazon. Even so it's a hard deal for me to get my head around. Amazon is not an acquisition-happy company. There's usually very clear alignment and they'v…

What if their plan is to buy the right to ship software updates to the million TouchPad owners?

On the simple end, they could port Kindle, MP3, Prime Video, etc., and make them available as part of of a firmware update.

If they really want to, though, they could even make an "official" upgrade to Amazon's fork of Android, with the Appstore and UI that the Fire has (more precisely, the one from the 10" Fire variant they're working on).

So that gets them: (1) patents they need, (2) a bunch of in-house expertise in the full tablet hardware and software stack, (3) a bunch of customers to sell their content to and convert to their ecosystem.

That pretty much puts every asset Palm has to use except for WebOS itself, and as someone posted earlier, even that might be useful as a hedge against Google's handling of Android.

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#73

Post by nazar »

alttag wrote: post #44
mappu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if Silk has Google "fuming".. Opera Mini has been doing the remote-rendering thing for years and years now. It is the most widely used mobile browser, with 113+ million users and 2+ billion daily pageviews.

> [Opera] is the most widely used mobile browser Use appears to be mostly from Asia. In Europe, iPhone leads by a wide margin, followed by Android; in North America, Android leads, followed by iPhone [2]. Opera makes at best a fourth place showing on these continents. To your point about "fuming", I think you're right. There's no evidence that Google's analytics or search (advertising) products will be negatively imp…

I can narrow down Asia to Post Soviet asian countries such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan etc. Internet is normally overpriced in these countries and opera mini has nice compression features and dedicated "turn off images" button, which is very handy. And not everyone here can afford high end iOS/android devices, so for Symbian, Opera mini is the best choice.

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#75

Post by notatoad »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #48
eurleif wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Kindle Fire is supposed to be an appliance. It's supposed to Just Work. Adding a second tablet with a different OS would confuse Amazon's target audience.

So where are there 5 different Kindle products?

there are two different kindle products - the e-ink kindle and the kindle fire. the e-ink kindle has a few different revisions with different input and connectivity methods, but in the end it is all the same functionality: the ability to read books, shop in the kindle store, and nothing else.

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#76

Post by kgen »

j_col wrote: post #19
modeless wrote: post #14

What would Amazon do with WebOS when they have already invested so much in Android? Switching would require them to abandon the app store they built. The Silk browser seems at odds with how WebOS works. All their Android UI customizations would have to be rewritten.

Look at it this way: their are about 1 million Touchpad users already out their due to the HP firesale. That's a nice market to buy, considering these people will want to upgrade to something in 12-18 months time, while keeping their profiles and all of the webOS software they bought (the app market in webOS land is thriving by the way since the massive influx of new users). I think whatever software work they would…

It is a little premature to say that there is no danger of being sued as most of the litigation around Android surfaced recently (almost after it began to gain traction) and not back in 2008 when it first launched?

With all the bogus patents out there, it is hard to imagine any complex mobile system that doesn't infringe on _something_ out there.

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#77

Post by untog »

technoslut wrote: post #67
zitterbewegung wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they will make phones or even continue webOS. I have a feeling that this is a talent acquisition and they will use it to improve the Kindle Fire.

They will undoubtedly make phones. Why give away a market to competitors that is worth billions? Amazon wants to keep users in their ecosystem. To do that you need a phone as well, which they're essentially already doing in their AppStore. Within three years Amazon will come out with their own phone. It will be the same game plan that they used with the Fire and gear it towards the low end. Eventually they will go to…

"They will undoubtedly make phones. Why give away a market to competitors that is worth billions?"

It's an extremely competitive, painful market. MS are struggling, Palm have already tried once and failed. Amazon is taking another approach (having their own AppStore on Android) and it's working out for them.

Hardware was Palm and WebOS's weak spot. An Amazon acquisition could be many things, but I very much doubt it's a play for any hardware gains.

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#78

Post by rudiger »

w33ble wrote: post #70
technoslut wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will undoubtedly make phones. Why give away a market to competitors that is worth billions? Amazon wants to keep users in their ecosystem. To do that you need a phone as well, which they're essentially already doing in their AppStore. Within three years Amazon will come out with their own phone. It will be the same game plan that they used with the Fire and gear it towards the low end. Eventually they will go to…

The Fire makes sense, it's a media portal that plugs directly in to Amazon's forte; books, and more recently, apps and streaming video. It's not a tablet though, and Bezos readily, and correctly, admits that. What exactly would they gain by making a phone? Sure they would stand to sell more apps, but I think Amazon is most interesting in selling books and being a player in the streaming media game. The cell phone, wi…

How is the Kindle Fire not a tablet?

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#79

Post by alexknight »

Even if this is true and it does happen, I would think Palm as a brand is dead. Even if the Fire 2 ends up having webOS, Amazon would never market it that way. Just as how Android is behind the scenes on the current Fire, they would do the same with webOS.

Re: Amazon in talks with HP to buy Palm

#80

Post by w33ble »

rudiger wrote: post #78
w33ble wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fire makes sense, it's a media portal that plugs directly in to Amazon's forte; books, and more recently, apps and streaming video. It's not a tablet though, and Bezos readily, and correctly, admits that. What exactly would they gain by making a phone? Sure they would stand to sell more apps, but I think Amazon is most interesting in selling books and being a player in the streaming media game. The cell phone, wi…

How is the Kindle Fire not a tablet?

It kind of is as a secondary function, but it was built as a media consumption/purchasing device, a kind of hand-held portal into the world of Amazon; even their browser relies heavily on their EC2 platform. Compared to the Android tablets on the market, it lacks a lot in the way of expandability and even storage. Even the underlying Android OS was forked to bring it further away from a tablet and more to an Amazon portal. That it runs Android Apps is just a pleasant side effect.

To quote Bezos himself, "We think of Kindle Fire as an end-to-end service"

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/29/bezos-in-the-modern-era-of-...

Post reply on HN