Since dropping webOS on its ass a few months ago, there have been rumors that the computer company was shopping webOS and its attached Palm assets around to potential buyers. These buyers reported included industry giants such as Samsung, Amazon and Intel. Unfortunately, no one was interested in buying, and here’s why: apparently HP wanted to sell webOS and its Palm assets for 1.2 billion USD, which is almost the same price that the company paid for it back in 2010, even though the overall value of Palm had plummeted because of the lackluster performance of its webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad and webOS powered smartphones.
Venture Beat says that estimates that for any company to snatch up webOS, it needed to be priced below 500 million USD, which is obviously far less than what HP wanted it to sell for. That’s possibly also part of the reason why CEO Meg Whitman decided to make webOS open source, which will allow the company to keep innovation going without spending too much on the platform.
Source: Venture Beat