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Selling webOS: The toughest job in the mobile industry

, HP is not "walking away" from webOS, and is working to hold the webOS team together for the next few weeks. This will be challenging considering the demand for talented smartphone engineers; web app company Sencha said it is "heading down to W. Maude Ave, Sunnyvale tomorrow with coffee, pastries and the prospects of fun and challenging jobs for the webOS web framework engineers. Great web app developers are in short supply and Sencha's hoping that some of the webOS crew might consider Sencha a perfect spot to land, should they be looking."

This is my next that, in the smartphone game, "it's not the operating system, it's the ecosystem." While Chou's comments were in response to questions about HTC developing its own OS, they also apply to webOS. No matter how slick, speedy and elegant webOS is or could be, a buyer or licensee would have to develop a webOS ecosystem while concurrently building cutting-edge devices and marketing them properly. Apple and Google have managed to do this, and Microsoft has a chance with Nokia, but there's not much room for another player. HP's Apotheker conceded that "to make this investment [webOS] a financial success would require significant investments over the next one to two years creating risks without clear returns." Any company licensing or buying webOS would face the same troubles, likely compounded by HP's very public admission that webOS devices "have not gained enough traction in the marketplace with consumers."

So if HP is unable to scrape up a webOS buyer or licensee, what then? The company likely will attempt to recoup its investment via the sale of webOS and Palm patents. As the $4.5 billion sale of Nortel's patents showed (and Google's $12.