Since early 2010, the Job and Esther Technologies team has been going around spreading our vision of a single operating system enabling all classes of devices, bringing interoperability between all kinds of computers and computer-like gadgets. In exhibitions that we attended in early 2010, we got all the encouraging responses of "how is this possible?", "I don't believe it", and "why have I not heard of this before". This morning, as I was reading the news, I was refreshed to notice that as big a company as HP has adopted a vision that seems to be following in the same direction that we have been charting. As published on linuxdevices.com, the HP CEO Leo Apotheker was quoted as putting forward the following strategy for HP devices ..

"We will be putting our WebOS on every PC we ship in the next year, as well as on our printers," Apotheker told Perkins and the AlwaysOn audience. "We see it as a legitimate alternative because it runs devices across the spectrum - PCs, tablets, smartphones, printers, everything - and runs them well." This offers a big advantage for software developers, Apotheker said, because they can develop applications for any HP device using the same WebOS toolkit and platform. Touting the ease of use of the WebOS 3.0 SDK, he said that the Angry Birds game was ported to the operating system in only two days." (as quoted from linuxdevices.com)

I definitely agree that using the same operating system on devices across the spectrum is a tremendous benefit to users, and that this indeed offers a massive advantage for software developers since they can now develop applications for any device using the same tools and platform. This is precisely what we've been saying at Job and Esther Technologies, and I'm happy to receive such vision-validation from a large and known company such as HP. In our case with Igelle, this comes with one small but notable difference in scope: We want to enable our customers to run their applications on any device indeed; not just on "any HP device". The real goal should still be in offering the best possible flexibility to the users, not just to ramp up hardware sales.

I also don't fully appreciate the comment made about the porting of Angry Birds. I would imagine that the fast porting time had much to do with the fact that the game was already written for another GNU/Linux based platform (Nokia's Maemo/Meego), and since WebOS at its core is essentially made out of the same open source software as Maemo/Meego is, more or less the porting should be quick, if it should be called porting at all. Unless they truly re-wrote Angry Birds in Javascript, but somehow I didn't get that impression here.

In any case, the world of interoperable devices is truly happening just like we knew it would. And this world can't be made of single-vendor hardware solutions, as it will touch people's lives in very broad and profound ways. Regardless, HP as a company does deserve a good amount of respect for their bravery to step out and move into the new world, especially where they risk the chance of angering a long-standing gigantic operating system partner.

And I do have to say that I also agree with Apotheker's closing comment: "Big doesn't always move the needle. Smart moves the needle." This is what I have always been telling our team: Great innovations are made by small groups of brilliant people.