It’s been a crazy and somewhat depressing week for fans of the former Palm and WebOS. I was going to give my thoughts as to the real reasons WebOS is being killed, but Gruber pretty much covered that. A related PreCentral thread summed it up even more succinctly:

If Mark Hurd didn’t like dining with escorts and expensing it, WebOS would still be alive.

Ok, labeling Jodie Fisher an “escort” may be a stretch, but philosophically speaking, that’s the nut of why the best non-Apple mobile operating system just bit the dust.

And, HP’s pleas to the contrary, WebOS’ future looks dim. With no new hardware coming out anytime in the near future—the Pre³, which is just starting to trickle out in Europe, is already a half year old at launch—and WebOS developers are clearly looking elsewhere. A new manufacturer deciding to use WebOS would be faced with a declining base of users and a moldering app ecosystem. It wouldn’t be the case of a new manufacturer taking over the ecosystem has much as being forced to reboot it.

Even the “reboot” would be unlikely, as HP is saying they don’t intend to sell WebOS, only license it. But who would it benefit to take up such a license at this point, after HP had done so much damage? If HP was serious about keeping WebOS alive and giving it a future, they would have had a licensing arrangement in place with a manufacturer before killing off their own hardware.

I don’t know what HP could have done to screw this up more than they already have, aside from maybe giving away the Touchpads while at the same time announcing they’d be turning off the App Catalog, the HP Movie Store and Synergy-related cloud services on September 1.

If I were a HP stockholder—and thank god I’m not—I’d look at what is happening right now as an intentional effort by HP to destroy shareholder value. They’re acting like a US version of RIM—an organization that is trying to bring the Crazy, and trying to bring it in a big way. There is an almost active disregard of their user base here, but they probably don’t care, as they see themselves as going full-enterprise. They looked at their WebOS users, those-long suffering, exceedingly patient folks who loved and saw remarkable potential in the software, and told them to go jump off a cliff. Because, you know, they won’t need us anymore anyway once all they do is consulting and big iron.

I was one of those folks who spent a stupid amount of time over the weekend trying to get a $99 Touchpad, and it’s looks like we’re going to get one. We’re getting it for a pretty specific purpose, though—a mobile movie-watching device to keep our preschooler entertained while traveling—and are practical about the future of WebOS… Of which there is none.