HP to Keep PC Division

Will they keep WebOS?

Unlikely. Besides the fact that almost no one actually has any faith in it as a platform due to the way HP dropped it, even if they did do a 180, people would still have shaken confidence.

Not to mention that there are currently no currently officially selling WebOS devices (except for a few straggling phones in the discount bin), nor plans for new ones.

And, when your competitors are Android, WP7, and iOS, getting over the vicious cycle of "no developers making apps which means no people are buying apps which means that no developers are making apps..." is just too much. Even Android was struggling with that and still is on the tablet side even with the Google juggernaut behind it.

Plus, even in printers and lower end devices and phones like that, WebOS is overkill. Samsung's Bada and Android are crowding that market too tightly, not to mention Symbian.

Maybe we'll see WebOS as an "instant boot" option on a few HP PC models for which it was already in development but that doesn't really count.

There's no future for WebOS. It's dead. When your competitors are Microsoft, Google, and Apple, and they already have entrenched hardware and software products in the same market that are innovative and being actively developed, and are directly competing against yours, and are having far more money pumped into them, and have thriving ecosystems, and haven't been officially been killed off, you may just be best off going home.

This decision is better than their CEO pick (meg whitman) but these big decisions affect each other... I don't see much future but decline for HP

Wow. What is going on there? At first I thought Apotheker was hired to complete some "unpopular" tasks, and then a new CEO could start over. But it seems like the board was completely asleep while Apotheker made his decisions. I am looking forward to some massive lawsuits brought against these people. Apotheker probably was the most clever guy in this, and knew that he could make a quick 20 million even though he would be fired. Would be interested in insights from HP employees.

WebOS has suffered from severe performance and stability problems for three years, with no solution in sight.

This was demonstrated both when the WebOS application layer received a 2X performance boost when ported to WebKit on iOS, and again when Android was ported to the TouchPad hardware and was found to be quite a lot faster than WebOS.

It's quite clear that it is a fundamentally flawed architecture without a future. It's too bad; there's some interesting stuff going on in the application layer, but the underlying OS is a complete turkey.