Despite HP’s very best efforts to kill it, it seems webOS will never die. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that LG is going to use Palm’s little-platform-that-couldn’t-quite to run a new smartwatch that it plans to release in early 2016.
FROM EARLIER: Now we know where failed smartphone platforms go to die
Why in God’s name does LG actually think a webOS smartwatch would be successful, you ask?
Essentially, companies like LG and Samsung realize that they’ve been toiling away for years making hardware when the real money — i.e., the money Google is making — comes from controlling your own software ecosystem. This is why one unnamed LG exec tells the Journal that “we’re going to slowly try to build an ecosystem around areas we can have more control over.”
We’re seeing this in the smart TV realm as well, where Samsung is using Tizen as its platform, LG is using webOS and Panasonic is using Firefox OS. Basically, all of these hardware vendors don’t want to give Google any more power than it already has and they want to have more control over their own destinies by building up their own software.
Of course, given how fragmented this could make the smartwatch and smart TV market, the chance that any one of these platforms will become an industry-wide standard seems slim.
