Exclusive: HP’s core webOS Enyo team is going to Google | The Verge:
The HP team responsible for Enyo — webOS’s HTML5-based application framework that debuted on the TouchPad — will be leaving the company and starting at Google shortly, The Verge has learned. What this means for the future of Open webOS is unclear;
Congrats to Matt and the folks on his team moving to Google. They’ll do good things there, just as they did great things with Palm/HP and Enyo on webOS.
I have no inside info, but I expect Matt had an open invite and it’s been on hold, probably since before I left. What caused him to finally pull the trigger, I don’t know — did they finally hit some point in the work where he felt he’d finished his commitment to stay? Was it this new round of layoffs?
Whatever it was, this move was inevitable, and it’s impact on the future of Enyo is inevitable, too. I’ve been really careful to keep my mouth shut and not say anything that would sour the chances of webOS and Enyo, but you can guess given I was one of the first rats off this leaking ship that (a) I didn’t think much of the chances of success, and (b) this announcement doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Both are true; I wanted to be wrong, but I can’t see any real future to Enyo or webOS under HP at this point, too much of the talent is gone. I’ll give HP and Meg full credit for doing whatever they could to try to make it work, but the HP culture is fundamentally broken in many ways and hostile to the words “nimble” and “innovation”, and both of those were needed for this to have any real chance of success.
My view: “it’s dead, Jim”.
And it’s sad to say that, but I don’t think we can pretend otherwise now.
(sorry, Enda).
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