In an interview with CRN, HP CEO Meg Whitman said that the newly open-sourced webOS mobile operating system will be better than both Google's Android and Apple's iOS platform. That's a bold statement given that HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion and wasn't even able to produce a single successful device based on its acquired software.
Whitman's statement arrives after several former members of Palm walked out the door including Palm bossman Jon Rubinstein and webOS chief architect Brian Hernacki. Problems seemingly began once HP decided to terminate the sales of its TouchPad tablet and shelf webOS indefinitely. Unleashing the software onto the developer community for free under the open-source Apache license was probably the final insulting blow.
"This has been a very rocky period for the former Palm team/webOS team that we built," Whitman said. "And this was not a happy set of occurrences over the last six to eight months. So we have lost some people. Some are going to sign off, and that's OK, because we actually now have a way forward. What I said to all the employees is, 'We need each of you to decide whether this is something that gets you excited. Here’s the way forward."