Great news for webOS. The two lead developer relations guys just left.

How good is/was Palm? webOS?

Steve Jobs made every tech blogger's week by speaking on the company's Q3 earnings call this week. The reason for this was to celebrate Apple's "first $20 billion quarter."

Palm was purchased outright by HP for a billion and chump change.

So, not so good.

Which is why I continue to be surprised by how many tech sites, bloggers, users, developers and others fret over what's gonna happen to Palm and their webOS now that it is controlled by HP. And all continue to gnash their teeth over all the Palm "talent" that continues to leave HP. Such as TechCrunch, which today fretted over the departure of two more 'critical' Palm visionaires, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer.

Talk about completely missing the point.

Nobody wants Palm. Nobody buys Palm. No one develops apps for Palm. And all these great thinkers and tinkerers and strategists are doing no one, certainly not HP, any good by actually continuing to work for Palm.

Palm lost the smartphone wars. If HP gave away a Palm Pre with every single inkjet printer it still wouldn't matter. But webOS, the Palm operating system can live. Only, not in smartphones. Well, to be fair, it can be put into smartphones, like the upcoming Palm Pre 2, they just won't really sell any of them. What HP needs to do instead, is break down webOS, understand all its functions and abiliites, determine how each chunk of code can be optimized, utilized and otherwise leveraged and built into HP printers, calculators, medical devices, embedded devices, anything.

webOS can live. Only, not as a smartphone OS. The sooner all the Palm staffers are gone, the sooner HP can make this happen.