Tweets are coming in from HP’s press conference today that WebOS – the mobile operating system HP purchased along with Palm last year – will be coming to desktops and laptops. Very few details as yet, but wow… what a move.
As of Q4 2009, HP was by far and away the biggest home computer company, holding nearly 20% of the market according to Gartner. If they start aggressively marketing and distributing WebOS, that’s a serious threat to Microsoft Windows.
Looking at our own data, we see that WebOS is currently sending very little traffic – as a purely mobile operating system, it’s outnumbered 47 to 1 by iPhones and 31 to 1 by Android devices (although I should note we see twice as many WebOS devices than Windows Phone 7 ones).
But HP bringing about a new operating system is huge news no matter how you slice it. I wonder if this is more dangerous to Microsoft, or to the future health of Google’s Chrome OS.
Publishers, how does your site look on WebOS? Have you had a chance to check, and do you have traffic from WebOS devices? Combining this upcoming family of devices with the half-laptop half-smartphone nature of the iPad and other tablets means that any web publisher needs to start new research into what works on a bigger variety of devices.
At HP’s event, techmeister Robert Scoble managed to score an interview with HP CTO Phil McKinney.
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