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

Speculation

[cr@ckwhore]

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!

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

[hillct]

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

My bet is on QNX...

[Adnans]

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.

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."

...Yet that's EXACTLY what they've been doing for the last 2 years...

-adnans (ex BeOS coder/enthousiast)

Their "wonderful technology" won't get wasted

[Pac]

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).

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.

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

[AdamInParadise]

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...

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:Status report

[tb3]

I don't know about Palm, their finances aren't so hot, they talked about spinning the OS division in a separate company and then ditched it when the market went south, and there's a class action lawsuit against them for stock manipulation. I got a letter about it last night.

On the other hand, there's a great article on the Reg justifying the Sony theory. Sony hates Microsoft with a passion, they think their OS's are crap; not fit for human consumption.

So, imagine a Sony Viao with a custom Sony OS(tm). Tuned for multi-media, able to interface with Sony digital cameras, video cameras, MP3 players, memory sticks (heck, even Aibo). Sony is one of the few companies with the marketing clout and the consumer know-how to pull this off. It could happen, and it would really put a chink in Microsoft's armor.

Re:Status report

[Wesley Felter]

[P]eople in the know ... 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.

Gee, this sounds familiar...

People in the know have repeatedly said that an open source version of Netscape will basically never happen. The system depends on licensed code that Netscape apparently couldn't give away even if they wanted to.

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:No job security for sales and marketing.

[interiot]

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.

Is it AOL?

[scoove]

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 Bet...

[webmaven]

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.

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

[starseeker]

"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.