Ina Fried

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HP Has Meeting to Say It Still Doesn’t Know What to Do With webOS

It looks like employees of the webOS unit are in for another season of “The Waiting Game.”

Hewlett-Packard called an all-hands meeting Tuesday to tell the unit’s workers that it still doesn’t know what it is going to do with webOS, a source told AllThingsD.

According to The Verge, HP CEO Meg Whitman told employees that a decision is still some three to four weeks away.

“It’s really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,” Whitman said, according to The Verge. “If HP decides to do this (keep webOS), we’re going to do it in a very significant way, over a multiyear period.”

An HP representative told AllThingsD the company had nothing to announce.

As we’ve noted, the company doesn’t really have any easy answers. Most of the would-be buyers have said privately or publicly (and presumably to HP, as well) that they are not interested. The OS, though praised for its interface, has suffered from neglect under current and past management, while rivals like Apple, Google and even Microsoft are moving full speed ahead.

Previous CEO Léo Apotheker had made the call to ax the webOS hardware, pursue strategic alternatives for the software and sell the PC business. Last month, Whitman said HP would keep the PC business, but also said the company had yet to finalize its plans for webOS.

HP acquired the unit with its billion-dollar-plus acquisition of Palm and at one point talked of putting the OS on every PC and on many of the printers it sells, not to mention cellphones and tablets.

I’m checking in with sources, and hope to have a bit more soon, though clearly there isn’t much new to say here.

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