September 12, 2011, 12:44 PM — How would you feel if you were the chair of the first company to come out with a phone running a cool but very risky new operating system, backed it with all your resources, came out with some of the coolest products in the market and did all you could to make it look good, only to see its developer go marry someone creakier and far less smart just to avoid getting sued?
Especially when the remains of the market leave you dependent on your former swain as the only way to compete with the Apple Marketing Machine and its iOS juggernaut.
Would you look for some alternative that would either give you another OS to sell, or at least give you some leverage over your now-more-distant partner? Or just sit tight and count on sales of the other OS you sell, Windows Phone 7, to pick up the way IDC predicts it will?
If it makes the choice any easier, it wouldn't take long to count the Windows Phone 7 sales.
Cher Wang, chairwoman of HTC Corp. is smarter and more competitive than that.
During an interview with the mainland Chinese state-owned Economic Observer of China (story is not yet posted in English), Wang said HTC is seriously considering buying another smartphone operating system – which would give it some distinction from other major smartphone companies by giving it three different smartphone OSes to sell.
"We have given it thought and we have discussed it internally, but we will not do it on impulse," Wang said, according to the FocusTaiwan, which is owned by the Taiwanese Central News Agency.
Another life for WebOS?
The simplest thing for HTC to do would be to buy HP's WebOS, whose demise HP announced in August, but revived temporarily so it could sell a few more of the WebOS tablets from the $100 remainder shelves and entertain discussions with Samsung and others about selling it to another phone maker.
FocusTaiwain, Taiwanese state-owned news agency.
