HP agrees to buy Palm for $1.2 billion
What do you do if you’re two companies struggling in the mobile space? Get together of course!
That’s exactly what happened today as HP and Palm announced HP has agreed to purchase Palm Inc. for $1.2 billion dollars or $5.70 a share (a nice premium over the closing price of $4.63 a share). This purchase gives HP three important ingredients – the webOS platform, patents and intellectual property, and of course, talented engineers (who hopefully will stay on after the acquisition).
This acquisition does tell us one important aspect of HP’s changing mobile strategy – HP is intent on building more products based off of internally developed technologies (aka the webOS) instead of relying on third party platforms like Microsoft Windows or open-source software. According to this article over at the New York Times, HP plans on “broadly and aggressively deploy” Palm’s software – which could mean any number of things. Don’t be surprised to see HP branded mobile phones, netbooks, and tablets built around the webOS.
The real question is – is this all too little too late for HP in the mobile space? With players such as Apple, RIM, Google, Nokia, and Microsoft already all over each other in the space, is there really room for another platform? Only time will tell.
