What kind of perverse, unforgiving parallel universe did I wake up in that allowed the PlayBook to still be on the market, and HP’s TouchPad has been discontinued.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]The PlayBook is perhaps the most useless piece of crap to ever be released and yet it continues on with promises from the company that they’ll fix it. That’s not a product strategy.

It’s not just customers that don’t want the PlayBook — Sprint recently joined AT&T and Verizon saying no to the PlayBook.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the TouchPad was perfect, it wasn’t. However, it had the best chance to take second place to the iPad. More importantly, it had webOS, which I thought was probably the best alternative to iOS.

With the announcement from HP last night, it’s not only the TouchPad that’s gone, all webOS devices are gone.

That makes me think there is something else going on here. Marco Arment has a good point in his post last night.

Such motivators may include a big offer to buy the large patent portfolio formerly owned by Palm and likely extended by HP, which probably has a lot of applications in smartphone and tablet software.

Patents are a big draw these days and there’s no doubt that HP has a huge portfolio of patents that could bring in billions of dollars.

Another bad sign for HP is that developers are giving up — not a big surprise, but that doesn’t bode well for licensing webOS. All that’s left is to sell the patents.

Too bad.