[conspire] HP Melt Down

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 09:43:42PM -0700:

> Unfortunately, I get the strong impression that webOS was always
> highly proprietary at key levels, meaning that it was _always_ hostage
> to the proprietary software game of here today, gone tomorrow.
> Moreover, it has for quite a few years been pitched as a 'cloud'
> solution, e.g., intended to be tied to proprietary hosted services, and
> pretty nearly completely useless without them.

I was just reading _Martha Stewart Living_, and
Samsung is trying the "Internet Refrigerator" thing
again.  Apparently it's still a product category:
  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_fridges.php

The thing is, though, that it's a bad idea to encase
a long-lifespan device with a short-lifespan device
(like a twenty-year tube TV with a built-in one-year
VCR, remember those?  And how many generations of cell
phones have you gone through while your HP printer
was still cranking along saying PC LOAD LETTER?).
Instead, what I wanted a WebOS device for was just
a Web Browser on The Kitchen Wall (WBOTKW).

Or something like this, even...
  https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G

Of course, WBOTKW is a generic, low-margin product,
since it isn't a point of sale device for some
vendor's app store.  So the people who run major IT
companies won't be interested in making them.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org