WebOS, first from Palm and then from Hewlett Packard, came and went so fast most mobile software developers never even got a chance to play with it. Now HP has declared WebOS to be Open Source, placing the project (it’s really not a product anymore) under CEO Meg Whitman to show they haven’t totally given up on the mobile OS. But what is WebOS, really, in this new incarnation? Its potential is enormous — far greater than most people realize — but I simply don’t see HP and Whitman as being able to execute on the plan, if there really is one.

WebOS and its Enyo application framework are clever and elegant and have one important advantage over any competitive mobile environment, which is that they leverage a huge base of web programming talent. WebOS, while based on Linux, uses strictly HTML, CSS, and Javascript for application development — tools familiar to almost any web developer. So the learning curve for WebOS is very steep (steeper is better because you are learning faster) as opposed to, say, Android, which is also Linux-based but requires developers to learn an almost entirely new model (reusing only the language and core libs from Java).

So WebOS was simpler to start with and now it is free. Heck of a deal!  But what can people actually do with it.  In the HP world, plenty. Remember the plan was to put WebOS on everything HP made from printers to mainframes, sometimes co-resident with other operating systems like Windows.  HP could use WebOS as a sort of glue to more elegantly link system parts together creating a strategic advantage in the process.

Neither IOS nor Android are good at all things. Android plays well with its own services but doesn’t work nearly as well with Google’s other server-side offerings like AppEngine. IOS doesn’t like anything non-Apple.

WebOS could be for HP the glue that holds its systems together making it suddenly more advantageous to go all-HP bottom-to-top, especially for enterprise customers, where the money is. Imagine WebOS alternatives for, say, cloud data synchronization like iCloud and SkyDrive, two terrifically complex and closed products.  And by allowing third-party glue through Open Source, HP would be tacitly admitting that it can’t imagine or create every necessary component, so make one of your own, please.

HP would sell hardware, they’d sell high-margin associated services, but the heavy development lifting would be shared with a large cadre of Open Source developers. At least that’s what I imagine the plan to be: HP hasn’t been clear.

Open Source WebOS, then, is really an anti-IBM and Oracle (Sun) strategy more than anything else. So that’s what Leo Apotheker had in mind! But it can only work if HP makes WebOS truly open to the point of publishing APIs they might otherwise have kept hidden.

Whitman may talk a good game, but I don’t think her troops are ready to be that bold.  I think they’ll flinch, perhaps without even telling her, and make WebOS a little less open than it should be. And by doing so they’ll let WebOS fail.

Again.

Driving Miss Sadie

Last week I announced that I’m planning my own Android phone and the next thing you know Google does the same thing!  Coincidence? I think not.  Our motivations are somewhat different, however, and their budget, at $12.5 billion, is marginally higher. I’ve had plenty of time to think about this as I drive the dogs across country to our next home in California and there’s quite a bit more to this Motorola deal than other pundits have been saying.

Yes, it has a lot to do with patents and that might well explain Google’s goofy bidding behavior during the recent Nortel patent auction. Maybe Google already knew it was going for Moto at that point. Certainly with these 17,000 patents plus the $1 billion worth of patents acquired from IBM, Google can go toe-to-toe with Apple or anyone else in an IP battle. Cross-licenses of certain mobile technologies would certainly appear to be in the future for many of these companies.

And cross-licenses represent another important aspect of MotoGoogle that generally hasn’t been noticed — Motorola’s Java license. Oracle, the new owner of Java and all the rest of Sun Microsystem’s old IP, has been beating-up on Google in court, claiming the search giant has stolen Java technology. Not anymore. If this Motorola Mobility deal goes through (and I think it will) then Oracle loses grounds for its lawsuit, which is part of why Google is even doing the deal.

Okay, so Google is going into the phone business. Of course they are going to run the company as a separate business since that’s about the only way to spin the inevitable negative impact the deal will have on Google’s gross margins. Only Apple makes big margins on hardware and while MotoGoogle would like to be Apple, it isn’t.

What does this mean for Google Voice? I haven’t heard this question asked yet. If Google wants to sell phones they’ll mainly do so through the mobile carriers and every one of those carriers is threatened by Google Voice’s potential to disintermediate them and steal their revenue. I’m sure the carriers will ask for Google Voice to go away as a condition for handling MotoGoogle phones. It wouldn’t surprise me, either, if this turn of events for Google Voice surprises Google, which is a very smart company with occasional blind spots.

I think the deal is going to shake up the mobile voice and data businesses generally. And this might not be the end of it, either. What if, for example, Google mounted a bid for T-Mobile? Why not? Yes, it would be expensive but such a move would level the playing field in even more ways, giving Google a 4G network they could really use, shaking-up the incumbent carriers in the process.

What if, what if, what if… Google TV is so far a failure, but this deal could shake that up, too, with MotoGoogle perhaps entering the set-top box business. Certainly Motorola has technology to contribute and what will be interesting to see is how the business shakes out as a result.

This is a bold move on Google’s part. Not a bet the company move, but the move of a confident Larry Page who knows that bold action is required. He has guts, that boy.  And I think it is going to be fun to see how this plays out.

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Near the eve of Apple’s tablet announcement, I’d like to turn my 2010 predictive eye again to the mobile space where, as my title suggests, there are only three software players that matter — Apple, Google, and RIM (Blackberry).

But wait a minute, isn’t Nokia the big Kahuna in this space and aren’t they right now suing the heck out of Apple? Yes, but that’s an act of desperation, a stalling tactic intended just to slow Apple down or, possibly, send some useful license revenue from Cupertino to Finland. It doesn’t change the inevitable.

So-called “feature phones” are going away, to be replaced within two product cycles (three years, tops) entirely by smart phones driven by mobile app stores and the need for carriers to generate additional revenue. It’s not like you’ll even be able to find a feature phone to buy.

The smart phone marketplace will consolidate around three operating systems — Android, Blackberry, and OS X. Though there will be some ups and down in the market and the complete transition will take longer to complete than my usual 12-month timeline, Symbian, Windows Phone, and every other smart phone OS that isn’t from Apple, Google, or RIM, are likely to die or be reduced to insignificance.

None of these platforms expect to die, but that’s the way it is with these things. You don’t expect to lose until you’ve lost, generally.

On some level Nokia even thinks it still has a chance to win the war, but it doesn’t.

Nokia has faith in its very popular cross-platform application development environment, Qt, which it acquired in 2008 with the $153 million acquisition of Norwegian company Trolltech, father of Qt. Nokia sees Qt as its secret sauce — a potent weapon against Apple.

Qt, like any of a number of 4GLs can write once and deploy a lot of places. Where Qt is different from the other 4GLs (in the mind of Nokia at least) is that it manages to do what it does without killing app performance, probably because Qt began as a mobile product and mobile apps have to be lean and fast.

So Qt is growing up at just the time applications and OSes are growing down, thanks to OS X and the iPhone. Qt has made notable progress supporting 3D apps and a huge variety of processors, chipsets, and GPUs. They showed at CES the same apps running from the same source on a ton of different hardware platforms from handsets to desktops to set top boxes. And now Nokia has reportedly done the unthinkable, which is to rewrite Maemo, its Linux, in Qt.

Meanwhile, Apple has been rolling forward with its PA Semi strategy, the first fruit of which we’ll apparently see announced next week. I sense that Apple is headed toward a family of devices from handhelds to servers all linked to a cloud and ostensibly running the same OS. Apple is mining the ARM ecosystem for this move in addition to its own PA Semi extensions.

Nokia thinks that, through either Qt or various legal moves (or both), it can slow Apple’s mobile juggernaut. They won’t, and here’s why.

Apple hires the meanest lawyers it can find, paying extra bucks for that “kick them for good measure” attitude. I know a company that had long legal battles with both Microsoft and Apple and they said Apple’s legal team was far worse than Microsoft’s, hands down. So while Nokia’s appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to punish Apple, is an act of desperation, Apple’s similar response is just the way they do these things.

This legal situation is going to get uglier and uglier but in the end it will be settled with patent cross-licensing, no monetary damages or license fees, and Nokia feeling relieved to get out of the negotiating room alive.

This will happen, I believe, because Apple doesn’t really give a damn about Qt or Nokia. They care much more about Google and Microsoft.

Nokia is going to fail in using Qt and Symbian to compete with Android or iPhone application frameworks because Nokia just doesn’t understand software. Nokia is a hardware company that does software and hardware companies aren’t fighting this new war, they just build the weapons.

Remember Apple is a software company that sells its products in an expensive hardware box.

Ultimately (more than 12 months from now) there will be a shakeout and Nokia will drop Symbian and even Maemo in favor of Google’s Android and Nokia custom apps, UI, and hardware.

Meanwhile Microsoft will cut its rumored (and incredibly expensive) iPhone search deal with Apple, then it will introduce Windows Phone 7, which will fail to gain market traction for Redmond. Microsoft will ultimately align with Apple to avoid the embarrassment of working with Google, but this alignment will be solely for mobile.

That is unless Microsoft buys RIM and then doesn’t screw it up.