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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?)"
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