So HP is following in IBM's footsteps, but HP does not have a bunch of enterprise software products that they sell last I checked. So they would be integrating solutions from others and offering WebOS. I am little lost and baffled here. Can anybody tell me what HP does on the enterprise side beside manufacturing servers?
On the Google/Motorola side I am even more confused. Palm tried to license their OS while competing against those who licensed it and failed. Apple tried to license their OS while competing against those who licensed it and failed. Google is now going to produce hardware running their OS and license it to others whom they will compete against. I guess the "advantage" that Google has here is that unlike Palm and Apple, Google is giving away the software instead of extracting a licensing fee from those competitors/partners [sarcasm
]. So Google can look forward to making $6 per year per user on advertising money that they have to go collect from their advertisers. It seems like a very indirect way to make money -- especially when you are investing $9.5B ($12.5B - $3B Motorola cash). Especially considering that Motorola is going to act as a cost base for Google since they are currently losing money as well (Motorola was actually using that $3B in cash they had to stay afloat, and I am not even sure how much debt Motorola has).
All of these major moves this week are hard to get my head wrapped around. I understand what Apple does.... they build product and they sell product. Apple is focused on their customers (which is probably why iAd is so difficult for them -- since customers don't like ads). Being focused on your customer sometimes makes your partners and competitors very upset (AT&T dropping cheaper text messaging plans). But it makes sense since Apple's customers are who provide the revenue. Apple makes hundreds of dollars of direct revenue per user (per device sold). Even if Google made $10 per user per year, how many years of use can you get out of a device to make that a viable business? They have already invested over $10B in Android development (maybe as much as $20B if you count things like litigation with Oracle).
Maybe HP has decided that the customers who make them money are the enterprise customers and the PC business has become a distraction. Maybe this will be good for them like it was for IBM, but IBM already had lots of software products and servers to sell to the enterprise in addition to building solutions around them at an hourly rate. HP has the servers to sell and the solutions to build, but I don't think they have a whole lot of enterprise software products.
EDIT: Sadly, I don't see HP's enterprise arm making WebOS a top priority -- I see it dying the same death as BeOS.... something that had great potential that never really caught on.
