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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."
Gain some technology and eliminate a potential competitor for 'pocket change' (Be is worth about $20 million).
...Yet [defecating on developers is] EXACTLY what they've been doing for the last 2 years...
Errr, yeah right. Where do people come up with these numbers? Oh right, you're multiplying their share value times the number of total shares of stock. You do realize this is a meaningless number, right? Be does not have to sell for that amount, since no one (but Be) would be in a position to hold all stock.
Not that BeIA poses a big threat to QNX's offering.
Well now your bitterness is just showing... BeIA certainly competes head to head with QNX in internet appliances.
Funny... I thought they were trying to survive? It's pretty selfish of you to criticize a company that re-focuses so that they can SURVIVE. It's not like they were swimming in money, and decided to give developers the shaft. They're RUNNING OUT OF MONEY. They NEED MONEY. They had to do something. The IA market shift allowed them to reduce their cash burn, and focus on a market where they could sell to OEM's instead of the public. That's probably cheaper.
I myself would rather them survive, make money, and THEN go back to BeOS development. Not focus on BeOS development until death.
"And like that
AOL users want MS software (Office etc.) and Windows games. AOL would have to invest a lot of money into supporting all the hardware out there so that a typical installation works like Win98 / ME. I don't think they really want to shift their core business that much.
Meanwhile, *checks* yes, Be's own press page hasn't been updated since May 17. No help there...
It would help if you were on the right page (the press release page, not the "Be in the news" page), which was updated a few days ago with the employee news:
http://www.be.com/press/pressreleases/
Be's recent financial reports indicate that revenues are up over 600 percent. Thus proving that 600% of nothing is still, well, nothing.
In light of this recent discovery, I say we tell Sony/AOL/Palm that Be's profits soared 50,000% in the past year!
"And like that
aol would most likely MAKE Beos suck... It's not that far-fetched though, if they could get FTC approval.
I think the FTC would approve it in seconds. The idea of AOL having an OS (added to the browser they already have) and competing with MS would be a dream for them. The US Gov't is only continuing the antitrust suit because of pressure from the states and the people. I think they would jump at the chance to have an opportunity to drop the case with a "see, they have strong competition now, AOL on the desktop front, Linux and BSD on the server front".
I do agree with you on the fact AOL would probably make BeOS suck (by geek standards of suckiness), but you have to remember the AOL client sucks in my book though seems to be quite popular with non-geeks. I am not dead sure AOL could, or would, pull it off, but I certainly can't see the US Gov't getting in the way of them trying. Same goes for the EU.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
It could have ensured that the current situation, the exact one developers feared, would never happen. If you have access to the guts of the system, even if Be Inc. vanishes you can still carry on. People are a lot more willing to develop for a live platform than a dead one, and in the traditional sense open source platforms do not die. They may have very few users and developers, but those few are free to do what they wish. That's why Open Source attracts so many people. It was obvious that Be would not uproot Microsoft Windows, and until it did that it was not a safe platform to work on.
Oh wise one, please explain how Apple has been able to get developers for MacOS X?
They are not going to topple Microsoft any more than Be. The parts of their system that are important to most developers are not open source.
Be had a nice base of developers. What they did not have was people buying the OS. Had the playing field been level when they really got rolling about 5 years ago, then it might be a different story. Linux eroding MS on the server front, BeOS/MacOS eroding Windows on the desktop front. Instead, we all know the story, Microsoft controls the OEM's.
"And like that
Apple is able to get developers because they already have an assured paying customer base for OS X, one thing Be has never had to any significant degree. In 1984, Machintosh was IT for easy to use computers. They remained so for many years. That is when they developed their core user and developer base, an extremely loyal crowd. If Be had been around back then they would have succeeded on the PC platform. Possibly even defeated the Macs. Likewise, if Mac OS X had appeared yesterday on the market WITHOUT the already loyal crowd, they would have failed. People stick with what they know, unless they are compelled to move to something new by a truly revolutionary technology. That's what Mac was in 1984. Be is not that today. Be is, as far as the mass market (home and corporate desktop users) are concerned, doing what everyone else does, but doing it correctly. Not enough.
Open Source is a solution to this chicken-egg problem, because it attracts people for different reasons than just usability. Which is necessary in the early stages of the life of an OS, where usability compared to the competition is by definition limited.
As for Mac toppling Microsoft, the fact that they won't would have killed them except for the fact they had a loyal user base. Even with that user base Apple was dying until they brought Steve Jobs back.
Your last point, however, about OEM's, is absolutely correct and the point where we are in complete agreement. That control must be broken. That's what I'm hoping the government can do.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
" All OS would do is guarantee that MUST give it away."
Excuse me. Where in the GPL licence or the BSD licence does it say you can't sell for money the software?
Oh, that's right -- nowhere does it say that.
All it means is that some of the code is out under a licence that makes it friendly for people to use it in other free software projects. It could've been a way to get the hard work of the Be people out of the sinking ship, like Netscape did with Mozilla. Oh well. Our loss because some people there were perhaps uneducated about sharing the software.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Errr, yeah right. Where do people come up with these numbers? Oh right, you're multiplying their share value times the number of total shares of stock.
:)
Be's market cap has been hovering around $20 million for ages now. I don't see anyone paying a premium price.
You do realize this is a meaningless number, right?
As meaningless as your drivel, sure
Well now your bitterness is just showing...
Please.. I couldn't care less what happens to Be at this point in time. The whole situation does have an entertainment value nonetheless.
BeIA certainly competes head to head with QNX in internet appliances.
QNX is in the embedded space, of which IA's are only a fraction. And we all know IA's are a terrible flop. Who's going to pay $500 for a crippled proprietary PC these days?!! Be management jumped on the IA bandwagon/hype without doing market research themselves. OTOH everyone was predicting the IA market to be a multi-billion dollar one by now.
? It's pretty selfish of you to criticize a company that re-focuses so that they can SURVIVE
Huh? You call this surviving??? Get real....
myself would rather them survive, make money, and THEN go back to BeOS development
Dream on. If they ever made money with BeIA do you seriously thing they'd pick up BeOS development again? That's a carrot they've been dangling in front of the remaining developers. Don't take it seriously...
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I don't see much value in BeOS. It doesn't matter how nicely designed it is, the code itself just doesn't matter. What makes or breaks operating systems is a user community and a developer community, and BeOS has simply failed to attract enough of either. How to attract a large user and developer community is the billion dollar question, but a fairly clean C++-based OS apparently isn't sufficient.
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.
> I am a be fan, but i dont use it exclusively for > one reason and one reason only:
>
> Application support.
> Be never took off because the platform lacked
> developers.
There are no quality applications for Be because there are no developers. There are no developers because there is no market share. It's a well-know catch-22, and the development model appears to have no real impact. You have merely stated the obvious...the real problem with monopoly power.
Linux has applications and developers, mostly due to the GPL and Open Source, yet there is still little market share. It has had some government and corporate support, certainly more than Be, but nowhere near enough to be assured of any real future.
I don't see how my post is "Bullshit!" when Be (or OS2 for that matter) never got anywhere near the developer base and applications that Linux has.
The failure is not the model, it's the monopoly. Closed source can't compete with MS, open source might not compete with MS, and the anti-linux/anti-GPL zealots (presumably you are in that crowd) are going to have to eat crow on this one.
Bon Appetit!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I'll place bets on Palm as the mystery buyer... everyone knows they need a new OS and Be would be an excellent OS for the nextgen palm devices!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
So could it possibly become open-sourced?
Does that mean that the infamous BeUser, who's trolling I have not seen in a while, may be unemployed soon? Say it ain't so!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That, my friend, is the most frightening thing I have heard all day.
Next stop: MegaCorp.
Up For sale... Well that just goes to show, the computer industry is fickle. Be at the right place at the right time or you're dead. Be had a great piece of hardware, but couldn't sell it. They had a great operating system but couldn't find a platform for it. They had great visions for the information appliance market but they were there too soon.
Only 2% of all businesses in the US succeed to any great degree and here's more evidence of that fact.
The company has smart people, a great product but no one to sell to, and now they're up for sale. It's the american way... in a sad twisted sort of way...
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
They are in the same space as Be is trying to penetrate and I think they have the cash and the incentive. Gain some technology and eliminate a potential competitor for 'pocket change' (Be is worth about $20 million). Not that BeIA poses a big threat to QNX's offering.
...Yet that's EXACTLY what they've been doing for the last 2 years...
In the end I think it's poor management that killed Be (think: Commodore -> Amiga). Here's a quote from the quotable JLG:
"don't compare us to NeXT. We want to be a better tool for developers, not to be tasteful. We don't cost $10,000. We have a floppy drive. We do not defecate on developers."
-adnans (ex BeOS coder/enthousiast)
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
*sigh* Yeah, right.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
It will serve as the basis for the MacOS B, whose development will start in aproximatelly 5 years, as soon as Jean-Louis regains the Apple CEO post.
:))
(as a side note, I really, really wonder how much revenue have the late sales and marketing departments bougth into the company).
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.
... and even throwing the UI on top of OS kernels - but the tracker and deskbar, the cornerstones of the UI, are already open source ... opentracker.org.
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...
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?
3) For 6 month, BeOS didn't have an architecture to run on, while switching from the Apple architecture to the PC...
4) They just didn't listen to developers...
5) It was a single-user system...
6) Open Source would have been a good idea, two years ago, when they begun to run into serious troubles.
They didn't fail because of Microsoft, stupid users, the dot-com bubble burst or anything. They failed because they made stupid strategic decisions.
So long Be...
Nobox: Only simple products.
The quoted story is over a year and a half old. Things move rather quickly in the tech field.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Be had a great piece of hardware, but couldn't sell it
:)
Their hardware was cool, not great. My BeBox was obsolete the day I got a PII 233 box. The PII was much faster at most tasks. The BeBox was basically crippled by the MPC105 Bridge/Controller they used. This chips allows for a single PowerPC with L2 cache, or two PowerPC chips without L2 (in the case of the BeBox). The Bebox was at that time the only way to go if you wanted to code for Be. Shortly thereafter they ported it to Mac hardware, and a few years later to x86. Unfortunately the extra BeBox hardware was very underutilized. I think I wrote one of the only programs for BeOS that actually did something with the 3 built-in IR ports (remote controlled MP3 player). AFAIK there was only one company that ever released hardware for the infamous GeekPort(tm)....
But then again, Be only managed to sell a handfull of these boxes, and all of them at a loss.
-adnans (still a proud BeBox 133 owner
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
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...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
On a purely technical level, I'm hoping that Palm will buy out Be. Be's recent refocus on the embedded/internet appliance market really showcases the advantages of BeOS. Here, a real-time (or at the very least, low-latency) operating system can shine; moreover, since Microsoft hasn't yet conquered the embedded market, the barriers to entry aren't the same as the desktop market.
PalmOS is, IMHO, quite sufficient for the current generation of PDA's. However, as devices become more inclusive (personal organizer + mp3 player + cell phone + web browser) -- in other words, what everyone seems to think of the Star Trek "Tricorder" -- the need for a well architected OS is absolutely necessary.
I'm not one for buzzword compliance, but the fact that be is a modular, OO system will help in portability and tailoring for certain tasks. A PDA without sound hardware, for example, won't need a sound server runtime. Having the sound server be seperate and communicate via a standard API makes it really easy to excise that component without breaking any dependencies.
An area I'd like to see Palm/Be to venture into is programmable logic controllers. By marketing Be's technology, OS, SDK, etc. as a competitor to VxWorks, the move can be made into industrial and automated systems. While this isn't particularly sexy or well-rounded (something that Be strives to be), it's certainly dependable money. Hardware manufacturers such as Siemens, GE, etc. are always looking for something to replace their custom-written, more-spaghetti-than-olive-garden operating systems and applications. While most people associate Be with multimedia, DSP work, et al, the kernel proper can be slimmed down to handle simple serial input-output tasks. Once a hardware client starts to use the software, they're going to grow dependent on it, and that's a steady -- albeit not too grandiose --flow of revenue for Be (and its buyer)
Well, I can tell by the men in white coats encroaching that it's time to stop rambling.
--
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
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?
Burn Hollywood Burn
Yeah, but of all the professions, sales and marketing people know how to bullshit the best, so it should be the easiest for them to find new jobs.
Duh.
The two companies deserve each other.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
Yes. Jean-Louis was the real decision maker during some time after Jobs dismissal. But he never attained "CEOhood", his higher post at Apple was VP.
Just speculating: how would *AOL* like to get Be? Great OS, multimedia-uber-capable (good for all their movie libraries!). Friendly and more ready for the desktop than most Linux distros. There was talk here yesterday asking AOL to "get their own OS" if they didn't like the icon placement on XP -- well, here's their chance.
I see how AOL was glossed over (QUICK - SHORT!). Here's five contributions to a "top ten list" of why AOL is the likely acquirer:
1. They confused GEOS with BEOS and thought they had to buy it all over again.
2. What else do you do with all that cash piling up from the recent rate increases?
3. Albania wasn't for sale.
4. Case heard Gasse was from Apple and he wanted some pretty graphics for the cover of his next book.
5. It's Netscape all over again, baby!
*scoove*
My lab can barely manage to keep his tooth away from the furniture. He doesn't even know how to turn a computer on, much less what an OS is. Having a favourite OS is beyond his wildest dreams.
Or is your pet a chimp, a dolphin or a mouse? That would certanly explain it.
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!
is that it's Kodak.
Why Kodak? because they were always about bringing the ability to create to the average joe. I don't think that it's too much of a strech to imagine them extending this philosophy to multimedia as well, especially after Microsoft started screwing them.
Imagine BeOS based kiosks, digital cameras, digital videocameras... Not to mention a BeOS based set-top box that shows all those pictures and video clips...
The possibilities are interesting.
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Be's stock was up as much as 40% today at the news.
Yeah, and it closed up 16% to FIFTY CENTS American, an increase of SEVEN CENTS. I could throw the change in my wallet at Be headquarters and their stock would rise 16%.
The only reason I point this out is because I actually own stock in Be, Inc. I am not proud to say this.
For more information, click here.
I have a copy of R5 on my shelf that I have successfully installed on my PC before. It is standard x86 box. Or is your idea of standardized something like an old Packard Bell?
"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."
It could have ensured that the current situation, the exact one developers feared, would never happen. If you have access to the guts of the system, even if Be Inc. vanishes you can still carry on. People are a lot more willing to develop for a live platform than a dead one, and in the traditional sense open source platforms do not die. They may have very few users and developers, but those few are free to do what they wish. That's why Open Source attracts so many people. It was obvious that Be would not uproot Microsoft Windows, and until it did that it was not a safe platform to work on. Open Source platforms are safe by definition, since they aren't tied to the fate of any one company. Even if one project totally dies it's code can be fertile ground for another project - check out the dillo web browser for an example. This is what free software developers want, and what Be can never be.
Frankly, I myself wish that Microsoft would buy Be, scrap the Dos based crap they currently use, build a compatibility API to allow Be to run older apps, and use BeOS as the next generation of Windows. At least then we might not have such stability problems with Windows releases. I know people think Microsoft buying Be is silly, but frankly if done right the thought is actually very attractive.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
What happened to all the trolls who claim Linux, GPL and Open source are the cause of companies going down the toilet? That closed source is a clearly superior model, after all, it worked for MS and Apple.
Kind of hard to say that with a straight face after all the economic fallout of the last 6 months, and now the dwindling fortunes of the BeOS camp.
BeOS is closed source, runs on i386, costs little, has decent reviews and Be still can't compete against MacroSoft -- no big corporations have adopted BeOS, no governments, no schools.
I think the GPL and closed source are what is barely keeping Linux viable in the face of an egregious monopoly...the slide of BeOS shows it is MS, not IP issues or anything else, that is destroying the compute marketplace.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
4) They just didn't listen to developers...
Neither does Microsoft
Oh aren't you just full of analytic wisdom with your point-for-point repartee. Microsoft, see, they're bad guys, right? I mean, they must not listen to developers because well that would be bad if they didn't and they have to be bad guys so that you can say how bad they are, and they're big and mean and bad and oh wow hey I could go on and on but I'll let the rest of slashdot do that for me until the fucking cows come home, have calves, and i'm grilling their fucking hindquarters on my hibachi.
Hundred bucks and I can get enough developer documentation and SDK's bigger than a stack of encyclopedias if i printed 'em out. It's called MSDN. Most of it's even online for free. Clue check, there's a reason people develop for Microsoft SDK's.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Be couldn't get OEMs to preload BeOS r4.5 for free. What good would it do AOL-TW? "We'll give you ten bucks a copy to preload our OS?"
I still have the personal edition BeOS 5 on my machine. It doesn't recognize my sound card, which is on the BeOS-ready list, no matter what I've done to get it working (and I've had lots of advice on the topic from helpful memebers of the Be community).
Guess why I never bothered buying Professional?
I used to love OS/2 also.
A new desktop version just shipped July 30th. Serenity Systems licensed the version 5 code, and has released it as eComStation. $140 to upgrade from Warp 4.