Last month, when we heard the suggestion that BlackBerry should team up with HP to give its devices more of a presence in the enterprise, we called it the worst advice BlackBerry has ever received. What’s more, we expressed confidence that BlackBerry CEO John Chen was wise enough to avoid that particular pitfall given HP’s utterly disastrous history with designing and selling mobile products, low-lighted by its decision to buy and then quickly kill off Palm’s once-promising webOS platform.
However, it looks as though Google came very close to taking the plunge into the dangerous waters that BlackBerry knew to avoid. Via Droid Life, The Information reports that “Google’s Android unit has been talking to Hewlett-Packard and others about enabling the Google Now ‘virtual assistant’ to be used as a new type of search tool for corporate data.” The Information’s sources claim that these talks with HP fell through, however, although Google is still open to the idea of working with either HP or some other company to bring Google Now to more enterprise users.
The Information’s report also says that HP at one time tried to convince Google to let it manufacture a Nexus-branded smartphone targeted toward enterprise users, although as Droid Life points out, then-Android boss Andy Rubin “wanted nothing to do with it” at the time.
Gee, we wonder why?
