The TouchPad firesale was the first sign of the inevitable decline of Hewlett-Packard’s WebOS division, but now there’s an even starker indicator: The company has begun laying off workers at its WebOS Division en masse, according to a report from All Things D.
HP plans to lay off up to 525 employees, All Things D reports, though an HP spokesperson wouldn’t confirm the actual number. The layoffs aren’t exactly a surprise, as the company had announced that it was killing WebOS support entirely on August 18 as the initial phase of an all-out corporate restructuring. The company counted 324,000 employees as of October 2010 employees according to its most recent filing.
The world’s largest PC maker is also considering spinning-off its PC division into a separate business as part of an attempt to compete in the “post-PC,” tablet-crazed world.
Yet HP’s post-PC plans apparently also don’t include consumer-grade mobile technology, as the company also said it would discontinue development of the mobile operating system WebOS, which it had acquired in its purchase of handset maker Palm for $1.2 billion in April 2010.
At the time of that acquisition, HP reportedly laid off a number of Palm employees in the double digits, but nothing like this latest round of sackings. In fact, the last mass HP layoffs were of 9,000 back in June 2010, a figure which seems outsized by comparison but pales to the mass layoffs of the Mark Hurd-era, when up to 14,000 employees were let go in one fell swoop.
Still, the news is undoubtedly depressing for the American PC industry and the WebOS employees themselves, who have worked hard to make a product that stands apart from and is competitive with Android and iOS. As one WebOS employee revealed in a Reddit IAmA thread last month: ” Web OS was in my (admittedly biased opinion) the best and most intuitive operating system.”
Meanwhile, those still coveting what may well be the final product from HP’s WebOS, the TouchPad, can at least take solace in the latest reports that another TouchPad, this one a 7-inch tablet called the “TouchPad Go”, has reportedly been spotted in China. Who knows how many the company has in the pipeline. Perhaps another firesale is in order.
