Samsung May Buy webOS | Hacker News Reader

Samsung May Buy webOS

tekgoblin.com

Nowhere here (or on the TechCrunch article it copies) does it mention that Samsung has it's own smartphone OS: Bada.

It, like WebOS, is Linux-based, so there are possible opportunities to merge them. But it just seems like incredibly lazy journalism that no-one even mentions Bada's existence.

it wasn't a matter of ignoring Bada's existence, it was just the fact that the OS itself isn't doing well enough to be a competitor in the smartphone market. While Bada has plenty of apps and a solid build, when compared to iOS or Android is doesn't come close to worth, Bada is lacking a lot of things that iOS and Android came with in the beginning. Samsung might try to merge the looks and functionality of webOS and the applications and customer base of Bada, but at this point it doesn't feel as though Bada or Samsung will last very long unless they bring something new to the table.

That's not really the point, though. To write an article about a smartphone OS that Samsung may buy without making a single reference to the smartphone OS they already own doesn't make sense.

There are a ton of integration issues (both in code and in personnel, should they get anyone from Palm) that might affect their decision.

Samsung is not a M&A company. That really hurts the chances of this happening even if there are forces within Samsung and HP pushing for it. The top management is skeptical of successful mergers, and at a tightly controlled company such as Samsung that makes a big difference.

I still contend the best buyer of webOS would be Google. The patents are gold, the price is probably right, it eliminates the possibility of a partner turning into a competitor, and the talent would integrate easily. Everyone's already in the valley. Just shut down webOS for good, put the developers on Android or ChromeOS, and tell consumers to look forward to great webOS features making it into future Android and ChromeOS releases.

What a sad idea. That's exactly what I _don't_ hope for.

- No, Google shouldn't get WebOS. I lose confidence in Google every day..

- No, please don't rip WebOS (the IP) apart because of patents

- ChromeOS is more of a joke than WebOS ever was and is really the project that should die to bring more resources to Chrome or Android. What a waste..

You're making sense, maybe, from a business point of view. But for me this is just crazy and falls into the 'let us buy out a start-up, bury anything they did so far and hope that the people stay with us and work on other things we consider cool' category. Which works, sometimes.

Still - I hate those 'solutions'.

I would like to see webOS continue but has any commercial OS, not controlled by a US based company, done well in America?

Ubuntu Linux is doing reasonably well in America, as does Debian (neither controlled by a US based company).

A mobile phone OS? I think the Psion was doing ok in its day -- the operating system was later named "Symbian" and run a few hundred million Nokia phones, although it is not doing so well anymore.

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