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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."
i really liked be. i was a registered developer back when that gave you a four-didgit number (3860). i bought a dual-133 BeBox, and love it. they did a number of things right, particularly in the areas of user interface and multimedia, and even did a reasonably good job in partnering relationships. i was quite happy with their developer support (i've twice gotten email from JLG himself). but they also did a number of things wrong. here's what i think:
first, on the technical front, Be was an improvement, but not the revolution they liked to pretend to be. they had an incrementally better UI, kernel, and networking than Mac or Win32. but they were not revolutionary, nor were their approaches to these areas truely innovative. the GUI and file sharing models were examples of existing models done better.
second, there's C++. regardless of what you think of it as an applications language, it's just not a good choice for kernels, particularly ones with real-time or low-latency requirements. and it's not a good idea to make it the only real choice for applications development, either.
third was development environment. probably because of their history at Apple, the Be folks were quite happy giving Metroworks control of their development environment. which meant no (unrestricted) free compiler (at least on PPC chips). the wouldn't help other compler efforts (like gcc) with their object format. and while Metroworks may be good, they're just not the toolset many developers are most productive (or comfortable) with.
they also wasted much of their effort on things that didn't matter. there's plenty of kernels suitable for real-time or low-latency operation. many of these are available either open source or under reasonable licensing terms. Be would have been better served taking the OS X approach - build on somebody else's work, concentrating on what you're really good at (in Be's case, the multimedia aspect).
but i think what really killed Be was the path of least resistance. i first fell in love with the company for the hardware. a reasonably inexpensive dual-proc box with great numbers, and software that could use it. wow. okay, maybe they were a bit late there, but there's always been at least a niche market for high-end workstations. then they canned the hardware to concentrate on the software. which could've been okay, if they had reason to believe Apple would be more co-operative. they didn't; it was a gamble. and they were wrong. Apple closed up just as the hardware started getting really interesting again, and Be was stuck. then they moved their focus to intel hardware - a much broader market, but with correspondingly wider demands. it's much easier to support every Mac sound card than to support every PC sound card. then, when that didn't even go as well as they'd hoped, they moved on to the IA market, with much less defined power structures and less entrenched players (read: no Micro$oft monopoly).
at each stage, Be chose to find an easier path rather than finding the path right for what they had. like it or not, an OS originally designed for media content creation is not ideally suited to IAs. nor should one expect it to be.
anyway, if anyone's got any suggestions on what to do with my BeBox, let me know (don't even talk to me about Linux PPC).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Really? Then what is a PDA? You mean to tell me that all of the people who lined up for months to get a iPaq H3650 didn't want an "Information Appliance"? Or what about WAP phones? The "Information Appliance" market is going to be the market of the future, it's just a matter of having the right product, at the right time, at the right price. A few hit, many more miss. Face the facts, the idea of having a PC is becoming more archadian by the day. Information empowers people, and the more access that people have to information the better. The manner in wich people will access information in the future is still unclear, and that's what makes this market so fikle right now. But as evidenced by PDA's and such, a good idea will go a long way. And as more good ideas surface, we will all become less dependant on PC's.
And for the record, I do a lot of traveling for work and find that checking my balance from an ATM to be quite a useful feature for tracking my transactions *grin*
Moderators labeled this as "interesting"? This is a joke, right?
Palm as a likely buyer? Don't be ridiculous.
1) Did Palm suddenly find a downed plane with a dead pilot and a briefcase with millions of dollars in drug money? Palm has enough financial troubles of their own without spending what money they have left on Be.
2) Palm OS is already a good operating system for handhelds. Futhermore, Palm is already in the process of porting their OS to ARM--why would they want to buy another OS now and start over? Considering that Palm is already way behind
in getting their ARM-based OS out the door, if they stall any longer, they're dead.
3) BeOS was designed for desktops, and BeIA is designed for internet appliances. The only reason Palm would be interested in either is for something like the Audrey, which already is known to be a colossal failure. Again, this isn't worth the money, and Palm should concentrate on handhelds.
I like BeOS. I basically can't use it, because it doesn't support and , but I really, really love it. I'm sure there are other BeOS users out there that love it, too.
So why don't we just pool our money and BUY whatever proprietary parts are in BeOS? If there are a thousand people willing to chip in $100 for the good of all humanity, we could present <company z> with a million dollars to open-source their components, and everyone benefits.
Hell, I'd chip in $200, and I'm poor as shit. BeOS can't die. It's just not right.
37~ of the Palm workers are old Newton workers. (32 of them quit on one friday and left for palm)
The new palms are ARM, just like the Newton.
Apple has been rumored to have a "palm" for 3 years. If Palm had negotiated a contract correctly, they woudl be free and clear of encumberence with Apple after 2 years after Apple dropped the option to use Palm. It has been 2 years from the last strong "rumors", and lo and behold, the ARM target is annouced.
(Why did JEff/donna leave palm? Well, graffitti was going to be slaughtered in favor of the Rosetta interface. Yup, Real printing nterface to the palm.)
In short, Be is not a choice, given the strong Newton background of the Palm staff. (Graffiti was a MP100 App. 1st)
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
In any case, MacOS9 and Windows 9x seem to do okay without multi-user capabilities.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.