Written by HP has a sales disaster on their hands with the TouchPad tablet they released (article) but the more I read about Google scrambling to find patents to protect Android phone makers from having to pay Microsoft $15 per handset in patent licensing among other headaches, I wonder if HP could take advantage of this.
As a handset maker, the last thing you want is to keep getting shaken down every couple of months by someone else claiming to have proof that you are violating their patent with Android, especially given that you can’t protect yourself as you don’t really control that intellectual property. But if HP was offering you its operating system, say for $10 per handset with IP protection, hmm… right off the top there’s a financial incentive and then secondly, you’re getting protection. This sounds like a much better deal.
Google’s Android and HP’s WebOS aren’t in the same class and category as Apple who makes you think it’s about the device, but it’s really about the fully connected experience (note that I am indeed giving Microsoft the ‘Ron Paul – major US news network treatment’, i.e. ignoring it).
HP seemed to be Yet Another company to think that it just needed to make a slick device, and that’s the way things used to be, before Apple got its second coming of the Jobs and did to the retail software space what I feel IBM did to the enterprise services space two decades ago.
If HP is going to get anything out of its Palm purchase and WebOS investment, I think it’s really going to have to look at licensing FAST so that it doesn’t get labeled a has-been even before it’s had an opportunity to ‘be’. If it does this, then it has the opportunity to displace concerned/worried companies regarding the “maybe this was a bad idea, this Android thing.”
