HP didn’t buy Palm for its smartphones

ZDNet reported that chief executive Mark Hurd said spending $1.2 billion on a smartphone business didn’t make sense, and was all about its underlying WebOS and spreading it far and wide.

He said, “We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn’t seem to resonate well. We bought it for the IP.”

These comments aren’t all that different to ones he has made before, but it does put into question the place of Palm as a smartphone entity.

So what is the future? It looks like HP probably won’t be joining mass-market smartphone business any time soon, but devices with its WebOS should be with us soon enough.

He said, “The WebOS is one of the two ground-up pieces of software that is built as a web operating environment…We have tens of millions of HP small form factor web-connected devices…”

“...Now imagine that being a web-connected environment where now you can get a common look and feel and a common set of services laid against that environment. That is a very value proposition.”