[1] The company was funded during the dot-com bubble of 1998–2000 and subsequently changed its name to WebOS and adopted the primary goal of developing a web-based operating system, taking focus off its collaboration products.
[3][4] It was amongst the early few companies to offer software-as-a-service (SaaS), a popular and emergent approach to application deployment today.
[5] While HyperOffice was building out its collaboration functions, a young Swedish programmer, Fredrik Malmer released a web site known as webos.org to demonstrate the power of a web-based desktop.
Within a few months Daniel Steinman, Erik Arviddson, Emil A Eklund and Eric Pearson joined the team.
Perhaps more importantly, the WebOS API marked the first time a collection of JavaScript libraries were managed by a single central "kernel" and loaded on demand whenever a dependent object was instantiated, a practice common in compiled languages.
This was a step forward in the history of rich Internet applications as it formalized a process that is now used in almost all of the modern Ajax frameworks.
Although the company had changed its name multiple times to focus on the WebOS portion of its business, the core functionality of its products had always rested in its collaboration technologies.
In 2002 the company began development anew under its old name, HyperOffice, and re-dedicated its efforts to provide a collaboration suite (this time as a paid service).