HP Buys Palm and Prepares for World Domination

Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced today that they are buying struggling phone maker Palm. In true everyone’s got an opinion fashion, there’s lots of conversation about why HP will or won’t do any better with WebOS than Palm did. Naturally, I feel compelled to add my own two cents – in the ‘will’ column.

Most of the conversation on HP’s acquisition of Palm is around phones and that makes sense. That’s where Palm is currently and exactly the boat on which HP is missing out. It’s only logical that HP would want to get more of a foothold into the smartphone market. I don’t think that’s their sole game plan, though. Instead, they’re out for world domination.

Few people these days mention IPv6, the Internet Protocol standard that significantly expands the number of available IP addresses – up to about 3.4×1038 of them (that’s a lot). One of the reasons IPv6 came about was smart people realized we were going to get to a place where every electronic device was connected to the Internet. For that to happen, the infrastructure of the Internet had to support an extreme number of connections. That couldn’t happen with IPv4 but is more likely with IPv6. Why is this important? It gets exactly to HP’s point in buying Palm and WebOS.

HP, I think, and in spite of what they say now, wants their entire non-PC product line (and perhaps later, even that) to run WebOS. Every calculator, every printer, every smartphone, every scanner, every monitor, every tablet Slate style device, every video conference product – it will all run WebOS, their own connected-to-the-web, no-need-to-license-it operating system.

It’s clear that the benefits for HP are huge. I already pointed out that there’s no need to license it, so that frees them up to do with the OS as they please. Additionally, with one OS running all of its products, they achieve scale and presence. Sure, developers aren’t flocking to WebOS right now, but they might if they know it’s running on almost everything HP makes – from consumer products up to enterprise solutions. In addition to all of that, they get the peace of mind that comes with having a common platform on which to begin their world domination. It’s the very scenario for which IPv6 was built and HP is going to be there first thanks to this acquisition.

I’m open to being wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.