HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers

ryzvonusef writes "VentureBeat's (typically unnamed) sources identifies Intel and Qualcomm as being involved in talks for acquiring the Palm asset portfolio. However, citing sources intimate with HP's negotiations, it reports that the company wants to be able to license webOS back for use in printers; it wants it so much, in fact, that the issue has become 'a crucial part' of discussions. Maybe there's something about webOS and printers that HP knows and the rest of the world doesn't."

It could be a leverage point

[Chrisq]

Looking at the picture of the printer [wordpress.com] I can imagine that if HP wanted to get back in to tablets they could just have a cheap printer with a detachable control unit...

Products in the pipeline?

[JStyle]

Maybe HP already has printers with WebOS in the pipeline, a lot of them. Losing WebOS licenses at this point could be a major loss for their development group.

No Surprise: WebOS is HP's Best Option

[peterba]

HP wants a high quality touch interface for their printers and all other options are either too expensive (Microsoft), unavailable (iOS) or encumbered by patents issues and allow Google to data mine your clients (Android). WebOS is a good fit.

Eh....

[King_TJ]

Sounds to me like HP is simply misled, once again. They've probably been developing a lot of fancy stuff for their Deskjet printers on the webOS platform and don't want to throw all of their work away. Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.

Sure, there are times when it's convenient or even necessary to print something out - but ANY respectable printer attached to your computer can do that. HP has been trying to sell printers with built-in LCD displays that connect directly to the Internet and allow all sorts of interaction with websites without any host system even being attached first. When you get over the initial "cool factor" that your printer can, say, print up your airline flight schedule right from its front panel? You realize this is just a gimmick to encourage you to use as much HP ink as possible. (If you looked the same thing up on your computer, you might simply read it on the screen, or even print only a selected part that didn't use as much paper or ink.)

Honestly, the one thing I'd like to see HP do with their "all in one" line of printers is create more reliable, less bloated drivers for them! If webOS somehow helps them accomplish that task, it would be worth it (but I'm really not thinking that's the goal for it). Just the other day, my boss spent hours on the phone with tech support at HP, all because of their drivers making a confused mess out of things when you own several of their products and move your laptop between them regularly. (He had an older 7600 at his house which became his wife's main printer downstairs. Then he bought a new 8500 Pro model to use upstairs via their wireless network. He bought a second 8500 Pro for his vacation home. Practically every time he travels between his vacation home and regular house, something winds up getting screwed up so the "HP Director" software decides he can only select his 7600 for scanning, or one/both of the 8500's decide to stop taking any print jobs, or ??)

Not a surprise, there are a lot of money...

[stanlyb]

Right, there is a very big business behind network printers, or the ability to print anything, from anywhere, to anywhere, even from your mobile phone. If you think this is not a big deal, think again, and look around, and actually try to do it. And then try to think how could you do it in corporate environment. Still no idea how to make it work? And work transparently? Don't worry, there is still no universal solution out there. Now, pick any bank, or any organizations with many branches all around the world, and keeping in mind that there is still not good enough solution, you could imagine how much money are there, and what an advantage you could have if you do it properly.

Re:We B OS

[VIPERsssss]

I remember when an inkjet driver fit on a fucking 3.5 floppy, had pretty much the same print quality, and didn't install a goddamn update service, system tray, and a "helper" app.

Yes, I am angry about this.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Chrisq]

This is the most rational explanation for HPs behaviour I've heard. Well that and LSD in the water in the board room.

Surely the poster must be the next HP CEO.

Re:We B OS

[Bert64]

Well, the update service is to make up for the lack of an update system built into the OS...
The rest can really be done without.

Try Linux if you want sensible printer drivers, especially for HP printers... No helper apps, uses the update service already built into the OS etc.

Re:We B OS

[BitZtream]

How long has it been since you used windows? Mine has no problem updating itself. It's also more than happy to update printer drivers. Well, assuming the printer vendor can make them stable enough to pass basic tests ...

Maybe youve heard of Windows Update?

Re:We B OS

[gbjbaanb]

just because there's an update service in Windows doesn't mean its readily available to HP. I've only seen a few drivers in there - realtek mainly for my system.

How much does it cost to add your binaries to Windows Update? The Linux system is still far superior, partly because its free to add your code to it, and partly because even if you didn't want that, you can include your own update repository to it.

Re:Hah.

[pseudonomous]

I would like to disagree with the moderation of your comment, it is *not* funny. It is $&#*ing tragic. There was a problem "every printer needs it's own #!*& driver", there were at least two solutions, postscript and PCL that date back to at least the 1980s. But, unless you've got something fancy enough to be considered a network printer, odds are that "the printer still needs it's own #!*& driver". Postscript printers were not-so-common in the 1980's because it was computationally expensive and microprocessors and RAM were not cheap back in the 1980's, but they *are* cheap now. So, let's recap:

1. 1) We had a problem
2. 2) We found a technical solution 30 years ago
3. 3) We still have the same problem, I have no idea why.

Re:Hah.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Don't worry, we will soon solve the problem with "Cloud Printing" or some such nonsense; because implementing a hardware RIP like they did on a 12MHz M68k with less than 2MB of RAM back in '85 is much more difficult than dragging half the internet into the problem...

What is even more annoying is that, even if implementing a full Postscript RIP in the printer hardware were too expensive, or too slow, the standardization of USB, and the various USB device classes, would have been a perfect time to introduce a reasonably sane USB printer class, for low-end printers, where they could declare their parameters(color/BW, available media sizes, resolution, etc) and receive fully crunched pixel data, in appropriate color depth, resolution, and size, from a software Postscript RIP on the host computer. That would still burden the host CPU; but host CPUs are damn fast, and you'd just need to target a single page description language. Instead, we got a USB Printer Device class that is basically a polite standardization of "how to send whatever horror your cheap shit requires over a USB cable"...

Re:We B OS

[geekboybt]

"Try Linux if you want sensible printer drivers"

My oh my, how far we've come.

Re:Generic drivers suck

[jbolden]

A production environment? In a production environment end users (I'm assuming graphic designers) shouldn't be printing at all. They should be sending their jobs to an EJS team working on professional equipment. Content creators are not experts in rendering.

And HP doesn't make production quality equipment anymore. As for the rest, they are supported by generic postscript drivers.