Um
If they're trying to redeploy them internally, they've not been handed a pink slip, have they?
Hewlett-Packard continues to dismantle its webOS engineering team by handing nearly half of the remaining 600 techies their pink slips. The cuts began in September when HP's axe fell on 525 webOS employees following the decision to shutter the hardware unit that designed the now defunct TouchPad and Pre3 devices. Another 275 …
Already seen the bloodbath in APJ. However, it does appear that financial control was somewhat lax. If the finances are 44% down on the same quarter last year, cuts are inevitable and probably across the board rather than targeted at webos.
On a tablet, Enyo makes both iOS and Android look archaic.
That's because contractors have been bleeding HP (and by extension the tax payer in the case of their public services divisions) dry for a very, very long time. Guys who are contractors working in key positions as single points of failure earning upwards of £600 - £1000 a day for 6 years and more???? I'll take that gig please! Not their fault that the management are so short sighted btw, it happens all over our industry - won't pay a permie a decent wage but will bring in a load of contractors on highly inflated salaries just so you can get rid of them when you want to.
Is that the new buzzword for slashing the team in half? Making them more "nimble"? I guess I'd get a little more nimble too if I were trying to avoid an axe that falls repeatedly, but I'm not sure it helps productivity. I have a fire-sale TouchPad. I like it and I've bought more apps for it than for my iPhone. I think HP didn't stick with it long enough, and they're compounding their mistakes.
> I think HP didn't stick with it long enough,
It seems to me that it may have been the target of MS's Windows On ARM (WOA).
MS gives discounts over all their products and 'advertising partnerships' to 'loyal OEMs' . Loyal meaning 'doing as MS tells them'. So HP receives a discount on all copies of Windows and Office for all the PCs and x86-64 servers that they make. This must be worth hundreds of millions.
But of course this loyalty only applies when MS has products to use, so ARM based machines were outside consideration. Until MS announced WOA. If TouchPads did not use WOA then the whole of the discount would be lost over all types of computer.
It doesn't matter to MS if HP makes TouchPads with WOA or never again makes anything with ARM, just as long as stops making Linux based stuff.
What were 1000+ developers doing doing on WebOS?
Even with 100 managers, 100 planners, and 100 testers, that still leaves 700 warm bodies.... hardware takes very few, maybe 50 including supply chain management. Now down to 650 keyboard bashers. No wonder HP took the axe to them, that is 3x as many as should be needed.
And, 1000 bodies cost maybe 150K each (including a piece of Whitman's bloated salary and perks, benes, dividends, pay, roof, heat light and compute power...). That's 150M, kills your profits unless sales breaks the 10M volume, redline at 1M units, and a hopeless loss for firesale slabs that don't even recover BOM cost.
The title of this could have been finished with "At the behest of Microsoft".
My guess is that the license discount given to HP and other favored resellers by M$ far outgweigh the profit made even on a popular non-Windows tablet.
That or the history of glue sniffing continues at HP's executive level.