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Be, Inc. Says Cash Can't Last Past Q2
psyklohps writes: "Excite News has this story about Be Inc. and how it is quickly going down the toilet. It's a shame when a company creates a really good product and then lets it die by lack of advertising and not making any commercial applications to run on their own OS. Who knows? Maybe it will be released as open source? (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?)"
MS didn't rescue Apple by pouring money into them. At its worst point(s) Apple had - and still have to this day - a couple billion in cash reserves. MS invested $150 million in non-controlling APPL stock in '97 in what was widely believed to be the (MS) face-saving tip of the iceberg of an out-of-court settlement for massive source theft of Quicktime code. (Continuing MS Office for the Mac through 2002+ and doing IE for the Mac are widely believed to be the rest of the iceberg, and are much more plausible candidates for just-in-time salvation). john drake 7
So, in other words, Gassee succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, in making BeOS the next Amiga.
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I have a silly/simple question for which I could not find the answer on Be's website. Maybe a good, well-composed answer to this question would get moderated up :-)
Question:
Basically, what's Be like inside? It is a BSD-like (or any *nix-like) thing? Are there forks, execs, and SysV-IPCs? Is it a VMS-like thing? Is it a (pre-OS X) Mac-like thing? Or is it just totally a different paradigm? If so, what's the paradigm?
TIA
Part of the Second American Revolution!
What would Red-Hat do with be? What would Oracle do with it? Neither company sells desktop applications (notice I said sells). Is Oracle going to write some magical user application that only runs on BE? That's ridiculus and out of their core competency. Oracle has made a commitment to platform and OS independence. Oracle is probably the most platform independent software on this planet it even runs on netware.
War is necrophilia.
I still have the BeOS personal edition for Linux download that runs from an image on your ext2fs partition. You just make a BEOS directory off the root of any ext2fs mount and put the files in it then reboot using a boot floppy. It then scanned your partitions found the one with the image and up she popped. The slowest part of the boot getting the loader off the floppy!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Does anyone know/have the history of Be from the last 2 years? Last I heard was they were doing the IA (Internet Appliance.) I guess it didn't pan out. ;-(
;-) At the end of almost every chapter was some insight into how BeOS came about.
The reason I'm asking, is because I ordered 2 copie of Be (one was a gift for a fellow programmer friend who loves the way Be was designed) along with the Be SuperBible, which we both thought was a real cool read. ("That makes my nipples hard!" -- inside joke for those who have read it
It's too bad the few mistakes Be made (no multi-user, lack of drivers, and being arrogrant towards Apple) was their demise.
I know I'm not the only one who would love to see BeOS open sourced. Pity that the company must fold though, in order to have that chance.
If this isn't proof of an OS monopoly, I don't know what is...
Steve Jobs in talks with Be? LOL! At the time Apple was looking to purchase an OS company, Steve didn't work for Apple.
Err, lets see here now, hmm, no mainstream product, no webbrowser for their OS that actualyw orked, err, no shit, of course htye where going to fail.
Ok, mistake here folks, their OS's MAIN claim to fame was that it could rotate a teapot.
It could rotate a teapot VERY VERY FAST.
Not to say it wasn't amazing, for the time. notg to say I don't think BeOS is a great OS, it is. Quite amazing really, immensly clean and efficent. One lean mean machine.
Lean Mean Machine that sitll doesn't have a browser that proberly renders pages without F---ing up. You *HAVE* to have a decent browser folks. Be released a browser with BeOS that was a demonstration model, designed to hold people over until the real thing came out from a third party company "really Soon Now (C)".
Didn't come, oops, sorry. remember the AMD IronGate chipset. Remember how much it SUCKED. Emmensly, heh, iot relaly really sucked. Ok, so it wasn't downright rotten, but it was relay behind the times folks. BeOS's pack in browser had the sma eproblem. it worked, but it sure as hell wasn't eligent. Let me tlel you, that ONE THING stopped me from buying BeOS. After all, if I cannot play games yet (coming REAL soon now, heh) then I sure as hell better be able to read my usual webpages, and not have to worry about horrid formating errors on them while doing so.
If Be had been smart htey would have relased a fully functional minimaly errornious browser for their OS that worked. ANd what's more, they would have paid some companies to design some KICK ASS development programs for BeOS. Media OS you say? Shit, I do NOT see any decent 3d Modeling programs fo rtit. No, not open Source folks., Face it, that isn't gonna cut it, 3DS-MAX is not open source, neither is Maya3d (I don't like either one myself, I am a Rhino3D type of person myself, but. . . . hopefully you get the point.).
I also did not see alot of video authoring tools for BeOS, if it is a media OS then it sure as hell be able to support EVERY DAMN USB DEVICE I PLUG INTO IT and deal with all sorts of odd end storage devices, after all, video and even high quality still images, lake up alot of spac,e and youneverk now what sort of storage system I may be using, best to suppor thtem all.
BeOS should have enterted into stragistic alliences with the likes of RealNetworks (heh, anyone wanna take bets on how long before they go outa buesiness, heh, I live close to them, I wanna go down to their HQ on closing day and yell something of the likes of "This is whatyou get for not making naything orignal since RealPlayer3.0" or such, not snappy, but damn true) where as the realvideo/audio encoders where on BeOS, whcih is perfectly suitable for such tasks and then had som,e sort of internet delivery support that allowed for BeOS to feed the data to whatever system/OS/.server needed it.
Mpeg2 Authoring, heh, BeOS why not? eh.
Ahole lot of thoer things that a media OS needs to take advnatage of to suceed, BeOS didn't have. Of course, the main problem is. . . . .
At the time BeOS came out, the Macintosh lateform was still considewred a viabale system for graphics work. hell, Apple still had people tricked intot hinking it was actualY BETTER for sucht hings. At about that time it was on par or slgightly better then the PC (talkinga bout oringal x86 release of BeOS here folks) but it quickly fell behind. Even so, peopel bougtht mac's instead of PC's, and those who did buy {C's bought Windows for it. After all,t here wasn't the idea that we need a much more efficent system. Hell, systems weren't yet nearly so powerfull that BeOS's tight programming made such a difference. Strange as it may sound folks, newer PC's will get alot more benifite from 10% increased utilization. Why you ask? Simple, heh, 1gigahert CPU, 10% is 100MHZ, 450mhz CPU, 10% is 45mhz, obviously. As I recall, 450mhz was top top TOP of the line when BeOS first came to the PC, and hell, as I said,
Spinning teacups, all they had.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
[Side Note: check out the Register for their April Fools edition of the website. It's a good poke in the eye with a sharp stick to some of our favorite people]
In any case, with that inflow of $$ from Sony, I do not think that the company is going to go under all that quickly, unless it is bleeding green really bad. The news story might not be be giving all of the details, unless it is one of those things of "well everyone is being careful with their money".
Sort of like saying to a man in the water "well rope is scarce, and we got to be careful on who we hand it out to"
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
FWIW I think Be did the best possible job under extremely difficult circumstances. I mean, obviously the whole idea of the company was to take a pile of cash and some very damn talented engineers and make the new Apple OS. When it became obvious the Apple's new management were not going to buy the company for $Big, they were essentially screwed.... Competing head on with win9x, or a wide variety of embedded unices depending on which story you believed.
That they've hung on as long as they have, that they ported to x86 in double quick time, can only be a tribute to the company's management and the quality of their code.
So why haven't Sony bought them yet?
Anyway, I've said it before - and I'll probably get flamed - but I still believe it: The absolutely best way forward for open source would be to have separate desktop and server OS's. An open source Be would be just wonderful, and this frees up Linux and *BSD for what they do best.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
The problem is that they made a product for nobody...it was nice and userfriendly, but the Mac had had that for years.
As for it's multimedia stuff, Mac had that market cinched up good too. Music, Audio, and video were taken up with Mac.
As for nice to customize, and a loyal following, Linux has that market. Following in that same light, It simply didn't have anything "mision-critical" If you really wanted to follow it, Video Toaster had the video market and will probably have it for some time to come.
But that's just my opinion...I could be wrong.
JoeLinux
http://www.escribe.com/software/beusertalk/m406
spoo
So now BeIA is the last best hope for BeOS. Which is highly dependent on a bunch of other companies wanting to buy it. Except that these other companies are also enthralled with Linux.
Linux isn't the reason why BeIA is a stupid idea, it's because BeIA is almost completely geared towards x86. i work for a company that makes embedded system controllers. let me tell you: nobody in the embedded market cares about x86. it's too bloated and too power-hungry for any reasonably-priced embedded device. a lot of people here assume that when "Internet Appliances" finally come to market they'll be x86 computers in a little box, but they won't be. they'll be small, cheap, cool-running boxes running on MIPS, PowerPC or SuperH chips.
BeIA was targeted towards those Internet Appliances that nobody wants. you know, the ones that are x86 PCs but are more expensive than just buying the parts yourself. the ones that people are keen on hacking up to run Linux when the company making them goes out of business :).
why did Be do this? because they had no no direction, and couldn't decide what they wanted. they made a nice operating system, i know (i owned a BeBox years ago), but they had no direction with it. they had a very loyal fan base with the PowerPC: people who were genuinely interested in using it and developing for it. when they ditched the PowerPC for bigger and better things they left a lot of people (like me) very bitter. and what's worse is that they called Apple's bluff (and moved to x86) and had the nerve to blame it on Apple for "not releasing the specs."
the problem is that in the x86 world, everything is a commodity. it's all about rock-bottom prices, getting the best deal, and using whatever crap hardware you can afford to scrounge up. there may be more x86 users, but they're not as closely tied together as PowerPC users, and Be found that this new userbase just wasn't as loyal as the PowerPC folks. in fact most of them would hop to linux in a second if the BeOS looked at them the wrong way.
i'm sad to see Be go, as i've been following their progress for years, but i'm hardly surprised. they had no direction, no valid business plan, and they completely burned the people that would have been willing to help them: namely Apple and the PowerPC community. they made some great technology though, so it would be a crying shame to not have their OS open-sourced. but to Be, Inc? good riddance.
- j
A wonderful company is going down and all you can think about is "when are they going to make their software open source?"
If you can't help them, and least show some respect.
It's just a shame it was impossible to find software for it.
The company I worked for a couple of years ago filled out a Be developer app, wanting to evaluate using Be for the next generation of the company's retail kiosk systems. Stuff had been built on DOS initially and migrated to Win3.1, and even in 1997-8, thousands of DOS systems were still out there in dire need of upgrade.
So what was Be's response to the application - which would have put Be systems in retail stores nationwide?
"Not interested, but you can buy a copy of BeOS on our website."
$49.00 smart... chapter-11 stupid.
As much as you may want to rag on them, companies like Microsoft and Oracle understand the developer market. Be didn't, ended up with essentially no apps, and is functionally dead.
*scoove*
As much as this would be interesting, I'd have to doubt any such open source "divestiture of the company's assets" would ever sneak past bankruptcy court, let alone the shark pool of shareholder class action attorneys.
Instead, watch BeOS get sold off to Oracle in a sweetheart deal and Gassee get some crazy title like "chief desktop imagineer." This would give Oracle the missing ingredient in its ambition of conquering Microsoft and allow them to mold their offering into a "Oracle-knowledge server + BeOS network appliance" package.
Interestingly, BeOS may be worth more dead and resurrected than in its current form. A functional desktop solves the puzzled for more than a few companies. If I were Redhat's CEO, I'd be on a plane yesterday working the deal on acquiring BeOS, releasing it to the open source world and having (finally) a complete client and server package.
Now there's a challenge for Microsoft...
*scoove*
Many people didn't like it because it "felt" too much like MacOS. I would say, however, that BeOS successfully united a strong backend with a strong user interface, which is the unattainable ideal of seemingly every other operating system.
It's just a shame it was impossible to find software for it. The basic utilities existed, as well as some fun stuff, but the hardcore apps that even Linux has did not exist for BeOS.
I sincerely hope that if Be, Inc. dies, they will at least scatter their ashes among us so that we can take advantage of what existed so far.
And for those of you who have never actually used it, clear off a partition and toss it on there. Get your hands dirty with it, so that you'll understand what we're losing.
Got Rhinos?
Slashdot runs basically no Be articles until there are doomsday predictions.
1. Be has been out of the desktop market for a year now. They are focused on BeIA and the emerging IA market. (And no, iOpener, Audrey, et. al. are not REAL IA's -- show me a broadband, wireless internet device, and I'll show you an IA.)
2. The Excite article is based on their SEC filing. They could have written the article a year ago, because that's about the time Be said they'd run out of money at the end of Q2 2001. However, they always fail to leave out the very large "UNLESS..." clause, which points out they're only going to run out of money unless they get funding. Be will get funding. Hell, if Qubit can get funding two months ago for an IA device, Be can get funding for a kick ass IA OS.
3. Sony has been working with Be for one year on a key part of their (Sony's) IA venture. They had to know Be's situation, there's no way in hell they'd bank on BeIA without knowing Be is going to last.
4. Gassee has kept Be alive on virtually NO PROFIT for eleven years. Do you honestly think he's going to let Be die now that they are standing on the brink of a vast ocean of a market? And you PC chauvinists who can't see the possibilities for IA's are no different than the IBM execs who couldn't see the PC market right in front of their noses, before they made the "deal with the devils at a little known company called Microsoft. You know, back when "computer" was synonymous with "mainframe."
Yes, sadly Be is on the brink of death. Funny thing is, they've been there for eleven years. And they've survived. Come back to me in a year, and we'll see where they stand then.
-thomas
"And like that
Be recently registered openbeos.com (as well as .net and .org)
see this article for more info. I have a good feeling it will go open source, which will be a really good thing for the OSS community.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents