Richard Kerris on the Future of webOS

Techpinions | | August 26, 2011 11:39 am

In a post yesterday, I mistakenly attributed to Richard Kerris, vice president-worldwide developer relations for Hewlett-Packard’s webOS business unit, thoughs actually written by Derek Kessler of PreCentral. Today, Kerris graciously spent a few minutes on the phone  with me to give his actual assessment.

Richard Kerris photo

Richard Kerris (via LinkedIn)

A bit surprisingly, Kerris reports that activity among webOS developers has picked up since HP announced it was shutting down webOS hardware operations. “What’s really holding together is the developers,” he says. “More than 60 groups of developers have been formed. There has been no slowdown in app submissions.”

The sale of thousands of TouchPad tablets at deeply discounted prices is  probably providing a  boost to the webOS app business. “There is an installed base and developers are seeing record sales of apps,” Kerris says. “It’s all been happening in a day or two.”

Kerris declined to speculate on just what the future for webOS hardware will be or when an announcement might be forthcoming. But, he said: “Once we come out with the right hardware partner, which we will announce, we’ll be fine.”

 

Steve Wildstrom is veteran technology reporter, writer, and analyst based in the Washington, D.C. area. He created and wrote BusinessWeek’s Technology & You column for 15 years. Since leaving BusinessWeek in the fall of 2009, he has written his own blog, Wildstrom on Tech and has contributed to corporate blogs, including those of Cisco and AMD and also consults for major technology companies.

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