Can HP make developers care about WebOS?

From CNET News.com: When Hewlett-Packard bought Palm for $1.2 billion last year, executives at the computing giant said Palm's well-regarded WebOS mobile operating system would play a key role in their company's future.

As is often the case when corporate acquisitions are announced, HP's plans for Palm were long on vision and short on details. Executives recently gave the broad outlines of a plan to eventually place WebOS on every PC that HP ships, in addition to phones, tablets, and printers. Sounds interesting enough, and when exactly that will happen is still anyone's guess. But if HP doesn't get plenty of third-party developers to work with WebOS, to make it into something as useful as any other operating system, those grand plans won't get very far.

Now comes the hard part: getting developers--and maybe even people in HP's many business units--to believe they should care about WebOS.

"The platform sort of stagnated" while Palm was independent, recalled Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, the Web-based and mobile note-taking app. "From a raw numbers perspective, it became difficult to justify ongoing development on WebOS since we had several hundred times more users on our iOS app. We didn't make any new features for nine months."

That sentiment can be the kiss of death from a developer, and it's something HP is trying to fix. The company recently hired Richard Kerris, former developer relations executive at Apple, and most recently CTO of Lucasfilm, to be its new VP of worldwide developer relations. Kerris says they're starting over with developers and the key will be to be consistent and be available to them for training and help. That means showing up at WebOS meet-ups not sponsored by HP, giving some developers an early chance to work on the tablet version of the OS, and reaching out to engineering programs at universities.

"It starts with having a consistent set of tools, development tools with great documentation, and making training available," he said in an interview with CNET. "To be honest, we haven't always done that. We've had some hiccups."

View: Article @ Source Site