Be Buyout Looms Closer

Xaroth writes "The Register is reporting that Be, Inc. has found a buyer. For those that haven't followed Be's progress lately, they also eliminated about a third of their workforce on Tuesday (28 positions), consisting mainly of their sales and marketing departments, but that number also includes some of their development staff. The Register claims that these layoffs are part of the buyout agreement. While an official statement hasn't been made by Be, Inc., the suspected "Mystery Buyer" is either Sony or Palm. Be's stock was up as much as 40% today at the news. I hope whoever buys them (if this holds true) continues development for the desktop--'twould be a shame to let such wonderful technology go to waste."

Comments

Re:What's expected to happen?

[pergamon]

nope. Be has gone over this question many times; there's too much licensed technology. i don't think i've seen a definitive answer on whether everything-but the licensed tech could be, though.

Who is the mystery buyer?

[MajorBurrito]

Speculation on the Be-related forums is running rampant. FYI, here is a list of the companies people have speculated about:

AOL - compete for the internet w/ MS
Sony - continued support for the eVilla
Palm - compete w/ WinCE for the PDA market
IBM - no idea what IBM would want w/ BeOS
Nokia - multimedia cell phones
EPOC/Symbian - same as above
Compaq - something to run on alpha???
QNX - add more multimedia capabilities
Sun - compete for the desktop w/ MS
Microsoft - final nail in a competitor's coffin
Gobe - compete w/ MS for the office suite market
Amiga - bring AmigaOS back to life

As you can see, people are letting their imagination run away with them. Some of the above speculation is pretty interesting, though. You can check out BeNews for the latest.

Status report

[babbage]

I've been following this pretty closely, as the company behind my pet favorite OS has, at least as far as the conventional wisdom goes, been steadily going down the tubes all year now. Random observations, no particular order:

• Though people ask for it continually, people in the know, such as _BeOS Bible_ author Scot Hacker, have repeatedly said that an open source version of BeOS will basically never happen. The system depends on licensed code that Be apparently couldn't give away even if they wanted to. I'd like to see this happen as much as everyone else, but don't count on it ever happening.
• New math department: according to The Register, Be's recent financial reports indicate that revenues are up over 600 percent. Thus proving that 600% of nothing is still, well, nothing.
• Supposedly, somewhere on beosradio.com, a ready to ship copy of BeOS r6 has been presented to CEO Jean Louis Gasseee. Various interesting takes on this one. Supposedly development on the desktop OS had basically halted, with all effort going into the IA version, so it would seem that there isn't enough code to be worth releasing a new version of the desktop OS. This is a shame, because a couple of useful components -- BONE networking, OpenGL graphics, etc -- were apparently under development before the switch to the IA focus, and it isn't clear if these components were then or are now ready for prime time. It could be a move to just get out one last version in whatever state it may be in, or there could actually be some new developments that haven't been publicized.
• Discussion at BeGroovy suggests that, among other things, this Palm press release would indicate that they're the likely buyed, while another commenter suggests, supposedly on good authority, that Sony is the likely buyer and they're already feeling out where they would want to go with Be & its technology. Then again, a a followup to that said that, at least as far as releasing BeOS6, he was full of it, and that the only developer working on BONE has been on an extended vacation anyway. Finally, one commenter noted that the final issue of BeDope ["Be's own Onion" --me.] had anticipated all of this months ago. Hrm....
• Over at BeNews, there was yet another link to the Reg article and a whole lot of discussion, generally going nowhere as these forums are wont to do, throwing out speculation that the buyer -- if there even is one, don't forget that this is still just a rumor -- could be any of Palm (they seem to like that idea; I'm not sure I see it but hey whatever), Gobe (developer of Be software -- seen as unlikely as they probably don't have much more cash than Be does), AOL, Compaq, Sun (now *that* would be a nice Network Computer...), Symbian, QNX (why?), Apple (doubt it), Microsoft (pretty sure that was a joke...) (too bad...), Amiga (ok that was definitely a joke), IBM, Hitachi, Samsung, Nokia, Transmeta, Intel, Red Hat (we're pretty safely into wild speculation territory at this point), SGI (see? completely off the wall, these people have no idea what they're talking about), QSSL (bonkers), DoCoMo (two unprofitable ideas that lose money together!), Wind River (who?), Ericsson, etc. Mostly this is all silliness. Towards the end of the conversation, a commenter notes that over on Yahoo's forums, the rumor has been confirmed (by who?), that the stock price is expected to shoot up (whoa, a whole dollar! golly!), and there will be an after hours announcement. Keep in mind however that, not so long ago, a 15 year old kid had such financial forums in the palm of his hand with his "expert" advice, so take that with the appropriate amount of salt. Still, something to watch for anyway.
• Meanwhile, *checks* yes, Be's own press page hasn't been updated since May 17. No help there...

Hopefully all those links work, if not I apologize. I'm just summarizing the various pages that I've skimmed over the course of today. If there's any truth to the Yahoo rumors, there could be confirmation of this as soon as tonight. Though it would be sad to see the company shut down or swallowed whole, a lot of people have seen this coming for a long time, and it would be nice to have some resolution of the situation. BeOS is some great consumer computing technology, and I hope very much that it has a future. Perhaps we're about to find out if that is the case...

Re:Be made a lot of good choices and still they're

[Auckerman]

Sure, BeOS is great, but the VPs just made a huge numbers of mistakes:
1) The BeBox: a completly new architecture. Neat for sure, but look at Apple...

Apple: Proudly going out of business for over 25 years.

2) They were planning to be "the Apple of multimedia production". Neat but maybe you should support more than 1 sound card (SB AWE32), humm?

Sound cards supported by BeOS

3) For 6 month, BeOS didn't have an architecture to run on, while switching from the Apple architecture to the PC...

Did their PPC version magically stop working?

4) They just didn't listen to developers...

Neither does Microsoft

5) It was a single-user system...

With Mutli-user job services and plans to move to a log in screen....

6) Open Source would have been a good idea, two years ago, when they begun to run into serious troubles.

I don't see what OS could have done for them, since they had a robust, fast, OS that they could not even GIVE away. All OS would do is guarantee that MUST give it away.

They didn't fail because of Microsoft, stupid users, the dot-com bubble burst or anything. They failed because they made stupid strategic decisions.

This reasoning I fail to see. This has been addressed time and time again. It was adressed in MS's trial and agreed to by Judge Jackson and the Appealate court. The Network Effect. Not only that, but MS uses value customer licensing to keep vendors from doing things it doesn't like. The more you suck up to MS, the less you pay for Windows, this includes not shipping an alternate OS. This was all covered in the trial.

So you tell me, who was Be going to sell their desktop OS to?

Re:What's expected to happen?

[coldguy]

there's a couple chunks already open. you can get the source to the tracker and the deskbar at http://www.opentracker.org under a BSD-style license.