HP will decide the fate of WebOS in two weeks

SELLER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP will make a decision on the future of its WebOS operating system in the next two weeks, according to the firm's CEO Meg Whitman.

In an interview with French publication Le Figaro she said, "We should announce our decision in the next two weeks. This is not an easy decision, because we have a team of 600 people which is in limbo. We need to have another operating system."

What she means by another operating system is by no means clear, but most industry analysts seeem to think that WebOS is dead, despite strong sales of HP Touchpads due to $99 fire sales.

Whitman also talked about HP's decision to keep its PC business, despite previously flirting with spinning it off or selling it.

She said, "To separate [the] PC [business] would have cost nearly $1 billion. Then, the impact on our revenues would have been too high. For businesses that purchase our servers, our networks and storage facilities also buy PC. Finally, the HP brand is indisputably linked to our PC [business]."

She added that tablets is an area that HP will try to get back into again, specifically it seems, running Microsoft's Windows OS.

She said, "Internet tablets are mainly used to consume media and e-mails. If you want to use productivity software such as Microsoft, you can't. Our studies show that this is an additional purchase that does not encroach on the PC market. This is an important area that we want to go into."

Last month, Whitman revealed that the company does not know what to do with WebOS, the operating system it acquired when it bought Palm in 2010.

While HP decides on what operating system it would like to use, The INQUIRER would like to give it this advice that it wishes Nokia had listened to: two turkeys don't make an eagle. µ