On October 4, failed California Gubernatorial Candidate and newly installed Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said that she would 'decide the fate' of the company's PC division before month's end. At that time, HP's original plan to sell the division had already been scaled back to a spin-off and as October draws to a close, it appears that HP intends to spare PC division after all. Not all is well for the beleaguered department; the Guardian reported Friday that though HP will no longer jettison PC, they're going to kill webOS.
WebOS, acquired in 2010 when HP purchased Palm for 1.2 billion, is the operating system behind the TouchPad tablet. TouchPad's notorious failure was a factor in the company's flirtation with getting rid of their PC division, and it was unlikely to survive regardless of that decision. Attempts to attract interested buyers - Amazon was rumored to have been courted - failed, all but sealing webOS' fate. One HP employee told the Guardian earlier that "There's a 95% chance we all get laid off between now and November." Still, the end of webOS means the loss of up to 500 jobs and the scary prospect of finding work in a tech industry battered by the worst recession since the 1930s.
