VentureBeat yesterday reported that as per its “well placed” sources Amazon is one of the front runners amongst interested bidders in acquiring the now defunct WebOS from HP. It’s no secret that after having their fingers burned with Palm webOS, HP is looking to get rid of it as soon as possible and that would mean selling it at a much depreciated low rate.
Amazon name in the list of probable buyers has cropped up as a surprise when many analysts were indicating that the HP discarded webOS might be of utility to Smartphone manufacturers like HTC or Samsung. But the same seems unlikely as both HTC and Samsung would not like to upset their OS partners in Google and Microsoft.
Acquiring Palm WebOS would certainly not cost Amazon a fortune. But I can see where they are coming from especially since they have themselves forayed into the tablet market recently with the Kindle Fire and Touch. Though the question still remains, will it be wise for Amazon to go the HP way and burn their money on an OS, especially one that would require Amazon to set up a team of developers around the OS and rebuild it around their hardware.
The burning question still remains and that is should the company go for building their own software when they have the option of a stable ecosystem in Android platform? Should Amazon be going for software when they have just entered mainstream hardware in form of tablets and risk losing focus while trying to go Apple’sque? Only time will tell, all we can do is wait and watch…