HP culls nearly half remaining webOS team
275 engineers not required in move to open source
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Hewlett-Packard continues to dismantle its webOS engineering team by handing nearly half of the remaining 600 techies their pink slips.
The cuts began in September when HP's axe fell on 525 webOS employees following the decision to shutter the hardware unit that designed the now defunct TouchPad and Pre3 devices.
Another 275 heads will roll, the vendor confirmed in a statement.
"As WebOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open-source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before," said HP.
"This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well equipped to deliver an open-source WebOS and sustain HP's commitment to the software over the long term."
The vendor said it is trying to redeploy employees impacted by these changes to other roles at the company.
In December, CEO Meg Whitman revealed HP would open source the Linux-based mobile OS with the platform's community expected to release a fully blown version, webOS 1.0, in September. Former Palm chief exec and webOS daddy Jon Rubenstein resigned in January, some 29 months after HP spunked $1.2bn on the mobile specialist. ®
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COMMENTS
Don't panic folks!
Remember HP is totally commited to the future of WebOS!
Re: More nimble?
> I think HP didn't stick with it long enough,
It seems to me that it may have been the target of MS's Windows On ARM (WOA).
MS gives discounts over all their products and 'advertising partnerships' to 'loyal OEMs' . Loyal meaning 'doing as MS tells them'. So HP receives a discount on all copies of Windows and Office for all the PCs and x86-64 servers that they make. This must be worth hundreds of millions.
But of course this loyalty only applies when MS has products to use, so ARM based machines were outside consideration. Until MS announced WOA. If TouchPads did not use WOA then the whole of the discount would be lost over all types of computer.
It doesn't matter to MS if HP makes TouchPads with WOA or never again makes anything with ARM, just as long as stops making Linux based stuff.
More nimble?
Is that the new buzzword for slashing the team in half? Making them more "nimble"? I guess I'd get a little more nimble too if I were trying to avoid an axe that falls repeatedly, but I'm not sure it helps productivity. I have a fire-sale TouchPad. I like it and I've bought more apps for it than for my iPhone. I think HP didn't stick with it long enough, and they're compounding their mistakes.
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