HP Unruffled by Downturn in Its Consumer PC Sales

title=Global Gravitas Will Play to Developer Community}

Global Gravitas Will Play to Developer Community

There's no question that HP's global gravitas will attract new outside development help when it comes to creating new and improved applications for webOS and cloud computing use cases. HP has never been particularly known for its creativeness in software, but this is, in fact, a key to the continued growth of the company. A key example is the company's new Application Lifecycle Management 11 platform. (See Darryl Taft's slide show on this topic.)

A new webOS app store is in the works, too. So look for increasing HP impact in software development as time goes on.

"We've been doing all of this [cloud applications] for some time, only it's been under other names," DeWitt said. "When you go back to the beginning of the decade to grid computing and adaptive infrastructure, the problem sets are not unique."

To access all that forthcoming cloud infrastructure, HP will continue to bank heavily on selling legions of different-size portable and desktop PCs for business and personal use. It also has invested a great deal in the soon-to-come TouchPad and the webOS Pre3 and Veer smartphones.

HP can't wait to get them into the marketplace. The company figures there is room for all sorts of devices-with keyboards and without-that will be needed for the huge demand it and the analysts expect to take place in the next decade.

"When we get these new devices into the market, when people see how well they work and how they interact together, and how our core applications and the new applications to come from [outside] developers will work, the story and the differentiation in the market is going to become very clear," DeWitt said.

DeWitt was citing how the TouchPad and the Palm Pre3 and Veer smartphones are designed to physically work together. For example, to sync one of the phones with a TouchPad, all a user needs to do is actually touch the two devices together, and voila, they can share email, video and other applications.

"This is the beginning of the race. We're going to see applications built in the next few years that are beyond anything any of us has comprehended," DeWitt said. "Developers have never had a set of services that they could write to, in order to manipulate tens of millions of devices.

"We haven't climbed up this hill yet, and it will be the hill that defines us through the remainder of the decade."