Hewlett Packard sack another 275 people

Hewlett Packard have sacked another 275 people, almost half of the 600 people working in the business unit acquired with the $1.2 billion takeover of Palm in April 2010.

The recent redundancies hit after 500 webOS employees were sacked last September after they decided to shut down the TouchPad tablet and future webos oriented consumer products.

An HP spokesperson said in a statement, published by CRN “As webOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open-source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before. This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well equipped to deliver an open-source webOS and sustain HP's commitment to the software over the long term.”

Hewlett Packard were attempting to ‘redeploy' staff to ‘other roles in the company according to the CRN report.

Jon Rubenstein, the former CEO was replaced by Meg Whitman earlier this year and she announced that Hewlett Packard would open source Web OS. They released V 2.0 of Enyo, the application framework for webOS late last month. More information on this is available on the developer blog over here.

Bill Veghte, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at Hewlett Packard said last month “HP is bringing the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community. This is a decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform's development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of Web applications.”

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