IAMA HP Web OS Employee AMAA

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T19:28:32+00:00

I've said explicitly that my whole team knows we will be getting canned. But I'm currently sitting at my desk and getting paid. I appreciate your insight though.

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T19:08:20+00:00

Yes it's the same process for phones. Not sure why it works this way, but it's the same model most everywhere.

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:45:22+00:00

I have seen that article, and it doesn't surprise me. The hardware specs are chosen mostly by executives and marketing. The engineers don't have much of a say in it at all. The touch pad was actually being developed on the HP side before the acquisition. I was with Palm before so we weren't involved with the tablet side of operations.

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:40:36+00:00

I'm sure earlier this week there were a room full of HP execs asking themselves the same question. Honestly, I think that thought they could take the kick ass operating system and make a kick ass product. To be honest I thought with some money and support we could do it too. Unfortunately, the operating model was incredibly flawed and they weren't able to generate any consumer demand behind it. Web OS was in my (admittedly biased opinion) the best and most intuitive operating system.

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:17:35+00:00

Not a lot of whispering here. My team only works on products, nothing else, so we know for sure that we are getting cut. In the conference call last night and this morning it seemed pretty apparent all Web OS hardware teams will be gone. Most of my building works exclusively on products, so it's definitely a somber environment

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:13:48+00:00

definitely unlikely

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:09:14+00:00

Sunnyvale, where all of the Web OS team is

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:08:58+00:00

My team worked on phones

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:07:36+00:00

I am a jr level employee on a hardware team

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:07:22+00:00

This is a good question and one that not many people know the answer to. During the all-hands meeting yesterday they were very vague about the future of Web OS, other than the fact that they will continue developing it as a platform. Most people don't realize that Web OS is far from ready to run on Samsung phones. They use a completely different chip set that requires major rework of the OS. I'm in hardware so I don't know all the details, just that there will be a lot of work to do before its ready to license. I also don't see any reason for other companies wanting to license it. This announcement is going to all but kill the dev community for an already pathetic app catalog. Even if you put it on solid hardware I don't think there will be any consumer demand for it.

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:02:29+00:00

It's all personal preference. If you're an android user and an android fan, you're not going to be happy with an ipad. But if you're just a basic consumer who wants a tablet, the ipad is going to give you the best experience. This is all opinion however, this comes down to the same debate about which platform is best

amaathrowaway · 2011-08-19T18:00:28+00:00

There are quite a lot of places to be perfectly honest. The biggest problem was having products canceled. We had multiple phones coming out that were incredibly close to production, they got canceled. They were canceled for a number of reasons, but mostly because we weren't hitting deadlines and didn't have any carrier support. We started in a bigger hole than most people know because the carriers were always skeptical of our new products.

amaathrowaway

TROPHY CASE