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Be to Drop BeOS? No.
MrChris2 writes "Found this over on benews, it seems that Be have decided that Microsoft dominate the desktop market too throughly, and have decided to withdraw from the field. There will be several more updates to the BeOS, but eventaully they will fold it into an Internet Appliance only OS." I called Be Europe this morning to confirm this, and it's just not true. I spoke to Jean Calmon at Be, who feels that the interview with Lamar Potts was taken a little out of context. Jean informed me that while a large amount of the engineering firepower at Be is being directed at BeIA and the 'internet appliance' angle, there are no plans to stop supporting or updating the BeOS. Gosh, this sounds like NeXT, doesn't it?
Isn't it obvious? Be is down financially, AOL has all the components it needs to be Windows free, except an OS. Yeah, they could go with Linux, but AOL has always tried to remain proprietary. Be will give them a foray into internet appliances (think set-top boxes and web-pads), has the multimedia capabilities that AOL craves (think AOLTV) and will tie-in beautifully with Mozilla.
;-)...
It just makes sense. I am starting this rumor right now
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
If Be were to be really like NEXT then Be advocates have nothing to worry about. After all, look what happened to NEXT. Corporately they were bought out but technologically, NEXT's OS memes dominate the new Apple. What is Cocoa if not NextStep?
From a Forbes perspective, NEXT lost. From a true nerd perspective, NEXT won all that counted. I hope the ending of the Be story turns out as happy.
DB
The BeOS was originally part of a package called a BeBox. I have one. It is holding up some books right now. It has 2 133mhz PowerPC 603 processors, midi in and out, a slew of serial ports, scsi, infra red ports, a GEEK port which has a bunch of DAC and ADC on one standard port. It was very quick when we got it. It took me months to get my developer software. But that was ok. We didn't have much in the way of docs for the API, their developer manuals weren't done, but we had some .h files to work with and I managed to get a program compiled and running pretty quick. Then the OS went up a version and I started over. Then they abandoned the hardware.
I have to explain, the reason we wanted BeBoxen were that we produce live exhibits and its ability to play MANY streams of media at once was needed. We were stretching our Macintoshes thin. This sounded like a solution. I remember one person who was using it to develop an ambient noise generator for a zoo. I knew folks who were doing similiar light controlers... It was a MEDIA OS with a MEDIA Hardware...
We were notified at first that they would not be supporting the BeBox with new OS after a year... Since all their developers were at that point BeBox owners, they backed off on that. I still am technically a Be developer but hell if I trust them to do ANYTHING right...
Maybe I have been missing out, but with a choice between Linux and Mac OS X and BeOs is there even 100000 BeOS users who don't use one of the other OS'S for their primary work?
I don't think so.
That was a good call, comparing BeOS to NeXT. Other than the comparison mentioned in the topic, there's a bunch of others.
Let's see...
1) Both started by ex-Applers.
2) Both designed to be legacy-free, "beautiful" OS's
3) Both started with their own hardware, with names referring to a hexahedral shape
4) Both OS's were considered for the job of being Apple's next OS. (NeXT won.)
5) And they both have the same goofy-looking
CaPS SeQUEnCE.
Hey, is BeOS is following in NeXT's footsteps, maybe Microsoft will buy up BeOS (though I'd suspect it more likely that say, Sony would for "PlayStation O") and make it into their next generation OS, though I have no idea what they could call it with their nomenclature. They'd probably call it Windows 40,000, and it could run on a PC, a handheld, or a Predator Annihilator Tank.
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Make mine methylphenidate.