It’s Matt Rosoff’s turn to fire some crazy juice into your brain. For Business Insider, he says:

The only way WebOS will survive is if HP licenses it to the big handset makers who are suddenly stuck between Microsoft-Nokia and Google-Motorola.

I remember people arguing the same about Apple in the 1990s, and look where that got the company during the short period where Mac clones did exist.

Of course, the mobile market is very different to PCs, but it’s arguable success is coming either for players who release really tight software/hardware integration (well, player; well, Apple), and whoever can fire their wares over the widest area (currently, Android). The problem with the second of those things is it usually results in gaining the low-profit area of the market, which really isn’t where HP needs to be scrapping. Instead, having found itself in an Apple-like position, HP should be pushing that all the more. It should make WebOS devices better than Apple’s equivalents, and the only chance it has to do that is if it keeps hold of everything itself. Licensing WebOS would just be a bag of hurt for the company.