Be Shareholders Approve Sale to Palm

moooooooo writes: "Well it's official. Be shareholders have approved the sale of Be Assets to Palm. Hopefully Palm will announce something about either a new BeOS version or licensing the source to the BeUnited crew."

Comments

Get a grip...

[hoggy]

...BeOS is dead. What on earth would Palm want to continue it for? There are pretty much no users and they add no value to Palm's core business. Palm wanted the assets: developer expertise, a useful codebase, a bunch of good ideas (and likely patents).

You can also forget about them open-sourcing the codebase - it's one of the assets they just bought. Presumably they see some kind of competitive advantage in having it (I'm not sure I do) - they're unlikely to give that away now.

BeOS had a great chance, and blew it

[mikael]

What BeOS had was amazing performance in the low-latency area of computing, namely audio and video.There is a huge market for audio and video processing. People in that sector goes with what runs best, they're even running MacOS 9 (gasp!), because Cubase and other applications just plain works better under MacOS compared to Windows. Some are still running Atari!

Be had their chance when Steinberg announced a port of Nuendo, their successor to Cubase, to BeOS. At that point, the entire music business was raving, "No more suffering from Wndows/MacOS!!"

Guess what happened? Be made the decision to drop BeOS personal edition, and instead pursue the BeOS Internet Appliance(!?!). This failed in a spectacular way, with Sony delivering the only shipping units with BeIA. Sony have since discontinued that product.

They had their chance, a niche OS that would dominate a small percentage of the market, but blew it big time.

Mikael