HP announced today that it will stop making phones and tablets using the WebOS operating system. The company had hoped to use these devices and software to get a leg up in the incredibly competitive mobile devices market.

In an earnings call, HP executives praised the WebOS software, even while admitting the failure of the associated hardware. CEO Leo Apotheker called WebOS "elegant," and said the company plans to keep the software and perhaps license it. However, CFO Cathie Lesjak followed with numbers illustrating why HP has no choice but to dump its manufacture of WebOS hardware.

"About a year ago, we made a bet on WebOS—that we could create a new ecosystem of apps and devices," Lesjak said, elaborating that HP was aiming for the number two position in the market (presumably after Apple). Touchpad sales were extremely disappointing, however—and were made even worse when HP had to discount the price of the device by $100. "With such a young ecosystem and poorly received hardware, we could not maintain [the number two] position."

HP says it's been losing money on WebOS. According to Lesjak, the company's corporate investments category, which includes WebOS, earned $266 million in revenue this quarter—but lost $332 million. She added that HP expected an even larger loss in the fourth quarter if it continued to support WebOS, and that really supporting and reviving the hardware would require one to two years of significant investment, "creating risk without clear returns."

Most people agree that WebOS is a well-designed piece of software that deserves better than the commercial reckoning it's suffered. That said, HP's not the first company to struggle to commercialize it. Earlier this year, I wrote:

Palm's WebOS operating system was the ailing company's last-ditch effort to reclaim the market it once dominated with its popular PDA. The WebOS operating system uses Web technologies familiar to developers, such as HTML and JavaScript, instead of Objective C, the specialized language used to program apps for Apple's iPhone. The Palm Pre, which was the first device to feature the operating system, was praised for its design when released in June 2009, but it was a flop in the market, leading to HP's acquisition of Palm.

Though HP came out strong earlier this year, announcing three major WebOS devices, many were dubious about their potential for success. I wrote:

Despite the many attractive features of WebOS and these three new devices, experts predict that HP faces an uphill battle. Sarah Rotman Epps, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, calls the integration between phone and tablet "a nifty whizbang," but adds that "it's unlikely that consumers will buy into the whole phone-tablet ecosystem."

HP also needs to get developers on board, since apps are a big part of any device's appeal these days. While WebOS always received accolades for its design, it never attracted the developer firepower of Apple's iOS or Google's Android, leaving much of its promise unfulfilled.

Sales turned out to be extremely poor. AllThingsD reported yesterday:

According to one source who has seen internal HP reports, Best Buy has taken delivery of 270,000 TouchPads and has so far managed to sell only 25,000, or less than 10 percent of the units in its inventory. [...] TouchPad sales aren't only failing to catch on at Best Buy, but also at other retailers, including Wal-Mart, Micro Center and Fry's, says analyst Rich Doherty, head of the Envisioneering Group.

There are still people disappointed by this most recent blow to WebOS. TechCrunch writes:

This news will come as a rather huge punch to the gut for webOS die-hards (myself included, though you can't say that we couldn't see it coming), many of whom have stood by the product for years — first in hopes that Palm would eventually launch a device worthy of the rather fantastic operating system, and later in hopes that HP's acquisition of Palm would be the spark to the fire that just never seemed to light.

HP may not quite be done with WebOS, however. According to Ars Technica:

The company says that it will "continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward." This could be interpreted in a range of ways, from putting webOS on less competitive platforms (the company has indicated in the past its desire to put the OS in items like refrigerators), to even selling it to a competitor.

Even if the company does try to use WebOS in non-traditional devices, a fate as the operating system for a smart refrigerator seems an ignoble end for a promising platform.

Updated at 18:00 EST with details from an HP conference call.

In a deal that has some experts scratching their heads, Microsoft announced today that it's acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion.

Reuters' Bill Rigby writes that, while Skype's technology was groundbreaking at its height and is still quite valuable, it's hard to see how Microsoft will manage to get its money's worth:

Microsoft is hoping that more business users would be willing to pay for Skype if it is integrated with Outlook e-mail, which hundreds of millions of people already use, or that more gamers will pay to join the Xbox Live network if real-time video and voice services are added.

It should also allow its new Windows Phones to compete directly with Apple Inc and Google Inc smartphones, which already feature video chat.

But some investors carped that Microsoft already had the technology to do this, or should have developed it itself, and may soon be overtaken.

Peter Bright in Ars Technica writes that Microsoft certainly has technology it could have developed into the features it's hoping to get from Skype:

Microsoft's own software already has considerable overlap with Skype. Windows Live Messenger offers free instant messaging, and voice and video chat. It currently boasts around 330 million active users each month, typically with around 40 million online at any one moment. Microsoft has an equivalent corporate-oriented system, Lync 2010 (formerly Office Communication Server) that allows companies to create private networks that combine the communications capabilities of Live Messenger with corporate manageability. The underlying technology of both platforms is common, allowing interoperability between Live Messenger and Lync. The company also plans to integrate Kinect into Lync to create more natural virtual presences.

Even considering Skype's paying users, Bright writes, Microsoft still seems to have paid too much.

USA Today quotes IDC analyst Al Hilwa offering some explanation for the high price that Microsoft paid:

"If Skype ended up in the hands of Google, it might have been able to use it to strengthen its ecosystem at the expense of Microsoft," says Hilwa.

But keeping Skype out of the hands of Google,may have furthered a different company's agenda, says Om Malik of GigaOm:

The biggest winner of this deal could actually be Facebook. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking giant had little or no chance of buying Skype. Had it been public, it would have been a different story. With Microsoft, it gets the best of both worlds: It gets access to Skype assets (Microsoft is an investor in Facebook) and it gets to keep Skype away from Google.

Facebook needs Skype badly. Among other things, it needs to use Skype's peer-to-peer network to offer video and voice services to the users of Facebook Chat. If the company had to use conventional methods and offer voice and video service to its 600 million plus customers, the cost and overhead of operating the infrastructure would be prohibitive.

Malik adds that Facebook could also help Skype garner more users and revenue.

Blogging often sounds like a great idea: sharing thoughts and expertise, becoming a part of a community, and taking the first few steps to wider recognition as a writer. But many bloggers quickly get disillusioned.

IBM's internal records show, for example, that only three percent of the company's employees have posted to a blog at all. Of those who have, 80 percent have posted only five times or fewer. Many of the people interviewed for the study say they stopped blogging--or never got started--because they didn't think anyone would read their posts.

In an effort to fix this problem, IBM researchers have been experimenting with a tool called Blog Muse, which suggests a topic for a blog post with a ready-made audience.

"We saw this disconnect between readers and writers," says Werner Geyer, a researcher at IBM's center for social software in Cambridge who was involved with the work. The writers surveyed often weren't sure how to interest readers, and many of their posts got little to no response. Readers, on the other hand, couldn't find blogs on the topics they wanted to read about.

So Geyer and his colleagues built a widget to bring these two halves of the problem closer together. Readers use the widget to suggest topics they want to read about, and they can vote in support of existing suggestions. Those suggestions then get sent to possible writers, matching topics to writers by analyzing his social network connections and areas of expertise.

The researchers found that writers were most likely to post on a topic suggested by a sizeable audience, and that audience members followed up by read posts on requested topics. Blog posts resulting from the system also received about twice as many comments, three times as many ratings, and much more traffic, says Casey Dugan, another researcher at IBM's Cambridge center.

The effort didn't substantially increase the quantity of posts however. The researchers speculate that this is because users who planned to write blog posts anyway simply chose suggested topics rather than coming up with their own.

The researchers want to do a larger, longer-term deployment of the original tool (their research was done over four weeks with 1,000 users). And they plan to present their results in April at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, GA.