It’s looking like Apple, as well as a handful of other tech companies, are taking advantage of HP’s recent fumbles by sniping talent from WebOS as the HP management tries to right the ship that HP’s ex-CEO Léo Apotheker took far off course.
Kevin McLaughlin, CRN:
What’s still unclear is whether HP’s future WebOS course will require the contributions of all the business unit’s 600 employees. [HP’s new CEO Meg] Whitman, in a December interview with The Verge, did not rule out additional WebOS layoffs. In the meantime, some mobile sales and engineering staff have decided to continue their careers at other companies. One example is Venkat Vasireddi, former Senior Software Engineer/Technical Lead for WebOS products, who joined Apple earlier this month as a Senior Software Engineer, according to his LinkedIn profile. Apple, which over the course of the past year has been quietly building its indirect channel capabilities and courting Microsoft partners for iOS integration work, also recently, hired two of HP’s WebOS channel managers.
Among the tech crowd, WebOS was considered an interesting competitor to the iPhone and Android phones. When it was announced last year that WebOS was shuttering, it was a dark day. Meg Whitman has promised that HP will continue WebOS and eventually get back into the tablet market, but it may be too late for WebOS as a platform to ever take off.
That said, the lessons learned from the rise and fall of WebOS could be very useful for Apple. Because WebOS has heavy use of Apple’s own WebKit throughout the entire operating system, Apple obviously has places for ex-WebOS team members. Using their experience and knowledge to tighten up web app integration on iOS or even OS X could mean really interesting things for the future of app development.
Source: CRN
