It's been a funny week, what with Google buying Motorola and then HP dropping webOS.

So how to put it into context?

Former Palm executive Michael Mace has an opinion. He's just blogged about it under the title; 'The Part of Palm that Smartphone Companies Should be Bidding For'.

"If you believe that every smartphone company needs to own its own OS, we ought to see a mad bidding war between LG, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Dell, and maybe Samsung to buy webOS," he questions.

Brains behind the throne

However, as it's likely HP has been trying to sell the technology for some time before canning it, this seems unlikely to happen, even in the face of Motorola becoming Google's preferred Android OEM.

Mace doesn't think that buying an OS is the right way to go for any smartphone company, anyhow.

"Turning yourself into a second-class imitation of Apple isn't a winning strategy, especially if your company doesn't know how to manage an operating system," he ponders.

Instead, he thinks the valuable part of the company is the staff who worked on webOS; even (or perhaps especially) for those companies using the open sourced Android.

[source: Mobile Opportunity blog]