Is it over for Palm webOS? Not quite yet.

In an article released today on Brighthand.com, the percentage of people expecting to buy a Palm webOS device apparently dropped down to 0% last month from 3% in March. Zero Percent. That’s not very much.

For what it’s worth, Matt Parrott is correct about one thing with webOS (in a discussion we had yesterday). Here’s the tweet I’m referring to:

I don’t agree with him that Android is the future, or that we lost all of our talent at Palm. If anything, we’ve gained a lot of talent by being acquired by HP. What I do agree with, though, is that webOS is currently a fan-driven market, and that it is the community that is currently keeping it alive (for the most part, anyway). That’s why I went on small rant yesterday to get people to stop talking so negatively about the operations at HP/Palm – it doesn’t help anything.

ArsTechnica (where I found the opening image) published an article earlier this year about it being over for Palm, but I’m starting to see the problems that they pointed out turning around, and it’s all thanks to the new acquisition and community involvement.

Turn It Around (good things for webOS)

1. We’ve nearly reached 3000 apps and I expect several thousand more in the next few months as HP engineers get more involved.
2. The marketing team at HP is pretty decent (better than the borg queen team, at least) and we should see good things from them soon. Beyond that, though, the community has stepped in several times to fill in gaps in the commercial sector.
3. The Pre Plus shows that the hardware could be solid, and with HP behind them we’ll start getting even better hardware than before.
4. Palm isn’t necessarily trying to win this game, it’s trying to create a new game altogether.

I think that the last point is the important one here. Yes, HP wants to make money, and a lot of it, on webOS. They’ve thrown out every other mobile OS now to focus on webOS, so you can bet that they want to see it succeed in a big way. But they want to do it in a different way than most people think when they look at the other competitors in the smartphone market.

webOS is not just trying to be a good OS for consumers, it is trying to innovate the mobile web and the internet as a whole to be more open, more standards compliant, and more efficient than ever before. Palm is developing new technologies (like db8) to make this possible, they’re pushing a webkit based Operating System out to developers so that people focus more on building up the mobile web, rather than building up apps on a single proprietary system.

Opening Up the Mobile Web

Yes, as ArsTechnica said in the article, Palm is taking a big risk by not locking down customers into their platform. But to me, this is actually a good thing. Look at Google, Yahoo and Windows Live. Years ago (as was pointed out to me by Dion Almaer) we chose our search engine based on how large its search database was and how fast they could bring us the results that we wanted. Today, most search engine competitors are out of the race, and the few that are left are either niche-based or are so huge that no one cares to look at those numbers anymore. It just doesn’t matter.

In the same way, people are choosing which smartphone they get based on the features that are available and the apps that have been developed for it, rather than the ease of use and the flexibility of the OS. Palm cannot win the App race game, even if it does get a few thousand more apps into the catalog. They can’t win the ad game either, unless something really good happens soon. What they can do, though, is change the game.

It’s not chess anymore, it’s RISK. In chess, if you’ve lost all of your main pieces, you’re screwed. But in RISK, you just need to hold Australia for a little longer. It gets the least number of reinforcements per turn, and grows very slowly. But no one cares to take it until they’ve already conquered the rest of the world. Palm has a very small but very strong fan-base right now that is growing very slowly.

But get ready for a major push. Luckily for Palm, it’s going to be even easier than that analogy makes it out to be.

The Push (with some help from everyone)

It is inevitable that at some point in the very near future people are going to begin demanding changes to the way the mobile web works. 10 years ago we saw major issues with web development and standards compliance in browsers. People built websites that only worked in one browser and not in the others, and everything was scattered. We are having that same problem today in mobile tech.

You can either develop an app for iOS, or you can develop it for Android, or for RIMM, or Windows Mobile or for Palm. But if you do it for all of them, then you end up spending a lot of time, money and resources trying to reach every potential mobile customer out there. At some point, people are going to want apps that work across all devices (including upcoming tablets).

Palm has put itself in a position to pioneer that movement and to create an environment that developers can lean heavily on to create apps that span across the entire market. As more developers build and support the technologies that Palm has created, there will be more articles written about the company and more investors willing to look into its potential.

As more word is spread out among the enterprise world, the regular consumer will begin to feel the effects as well and the desire for Palm to win will trickle down (just as the desire for browsers to be more standards compliant took 10 years to finally reach the public’s concern).

What this means is that Palm is in a great spot to thrive in the future, if not in the very near future. But for right now, we’ve just got to be patient and help see it through. Look at the potential for changing the mobile market, not just the potential for getting another new cool device to play with.

It’s not over for Palm. Not by a long shot.