WebOS HP PC released launched 2012 preview Leo Apotheker is not a guy who minces his words. He is pretty straightforward in the way he looks at the state of things in HP right now and is planning a course to revamp things at the earliest.
HP has often loaded special interfaces and software on its computers, but they have never been popular enough to be singled out as attractors. The software on its TouchSmart PCs only provides touchscreen support for certain tasks, and HP's past use of pre-boot interfaces like Splashtop haven't been unique. WebOS gives it a mobile OS that could start almost instantly but which could be used almost exclusively for many tasks instead of having to resort to Windows.
Nevertheless, it seems that we're not talking about WebOS becoming some sort of fast-booting InstantOS for the HP machines, but rather it delivering a much deeper level of integration (perhaps a dedicated application running in Windows, or a virtual machine of sorts?).
It seems that, beside making WebOS one of the company's key strategic initiatives, HP's new CEO has also decided to backtrack on some of his predecessor's decisions, and for this reason, it will allocate a much more serious budget for research and development activities, while in the same time attempting to actually bring down the barriers between various divisions, in order to boost the company's level of creativity.
