WebOS Team Leaving HP for Google
Well well, this is interesting. HP’s Open WebOS Enyo project has just lost most of its development team. To Google. Enyo is the platform within WebOS that allows for the creation of apps, specifically HTML5 ones. The move robs HP of a lot of heavy hitting programming talent, and takes away the people that were "responsible for 99 percent of the code," as one team member was reported as saying.
Enyo was central to HP’s revived plan for WebOS. Without the coding support behind it, well, who knows if it can continue? The company was planning on releasing version 1.0 sometime in late 2012. That might not happen now, though it won’t matter unless new WebOS hardware shows up.
But for Google, this is a major score. Enyo is actually a great platform to develop apps on, and though no announcement has been made, I am guessing that they are going to help Google implement an HTML5 app programming interface.
Or these people could be brought into the Chrome OS team, to help build a powerful HTML5 app framework there. That might actually make more sense, since Chrome OS is fully web-based and only runs web apps.
This isn’t the first member of the WebOS team that Google has adopted. The UI architect for Android version 4.0 was Matias Duarte, previously Palm’s design guy.
Regardless of where they go in Google, this is a bad sign for WebOS. HP just can’t seem to figure out how to make the platform a success, and the platform is on its third life.
Google has scored, here. The company is going to use the people to make development simpler, something that its platforms desperately need. And these are just the people to do it.
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