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Be Throws in the Towel
darrad writes: "ZDNet is reporting that 'Be, the failed maker of a computer operating system once considered a rival to Microsoft's Windows, said Monday it would dissolve itself on March 15 and delist from the Nasdaq stock market.'" The Be front page says the same, and explains that this is the natural conclusion of the company's sale of most of its property to Palm.
and thanks for all the non-GPL'ed code...
Is this really newsworthy? The dissolution is really just a formality after everything went to Palm.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Nice technology, clever stuff, but c'mon, that's like saying.. oh, wait, this is /., never mind.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I am a BeOS supporter, as I love the OS. However, I have not run the OS on a primary machine for over 2 years. BeOS users need to recognize that the only hope for Be is a Free Be, and that is not going to happen. YellowTab, as far as I know, does not have the source to the licensed code. So therefore, any changes they make are going to be cosmetic and not core changes.
The way I see it, if you really like the BeOS, head over to the Open-Source Be like projects like openbeos and pledge your support with money or code.
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
n/m, didn't parse the comment properly :)
In any case, why would Palm have bought Be in the first place if they didn't have any plans for it?
Buying something and then giving it away isn't a good business plan.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
But I am still trying to come up with Be users and advocates I know who I can laugh at.
Remember when Be was going take over the world yet us "free software zealots" who wanted the source code kept saying "but...what if Be goes under or becomes some kind of tyrant?"
Hopefully they learned that freedom means giving control of the software as well as its power to its users. Power contained in the hands of the few is little power at all.
If they're going to go ahead with their lawsuit (which may well result in a large settlement down the road), but they're dissolving and distributing now, what happens to any monies collected from the lawsuit?
Any lawyers want to fill us in? Do the shareholders (potentially) get some of it down the road, or does it go to some other mysterious land (assuming all debts are paid off)?
They've been dead ever since they decided to "change focus" from multimedia to networking. They had steinberg lined up, high-end sound card makers were starting to announce driver support plans, then they "change focus." As if the networking niche wasn't completely saturated already. Too bad, they could've given mac a run for their money in the multimedia market . . .
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Oh, gotta love the Windows software world... post a link to a executable file and everyone just runs it. Who cares what it does!
The inertia in things like operating systems and programming languages continues to frustrate me. If you aren't a mere extension to the dominant technology, you may as well not bother. If you're something significantly different, but only a few hundred percent better, you may as well not bother. The inertia is just too great for really good ideas to be adopted quickly.
Be will be a lesson to those who hadn't already learned from NeXT, Amiga, etc. When Be first started, I remember commenting to a friend that "there's a group that just doesn't get it." I've hoped ever since that I would turn out to be wrong. I wasn't talking about their technology, which I always admired. It was the insurmountable market barriers that they would face.
If you're not 10x better, the only approach that seems to work is to find a whole new market niche to go for.
(Sorry, this next part is going to sound like a troll, but...) Even Linux is a bit depressing. So much talent out there, and the best we can come up with is the amazing innovation of cloning a 30 yr old OS? Free and open source aren't technical innovations, they're marketing innovations.
There's so much research in OS theory, in programming languages, in user interfaces and human-computer interaction -- so many great ideas from the 80s and 90s that will take another generation to reach the daily lives of most of us professional developers.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Everyone was, at that time, aware of the "chicken and egg" problem: a new platform has no software, so no users will migrate to it, so nobody will write software, etc. This problem had doomed every new platform. Everyone was aware of it. Be decided to forge ahead anyway, while offering no solution to this problem whatsoever.
Wrong. Be did have a solution. They made it easy to install/run BeOS alongside Windows and Linux. Then people could easily switch into Be for things that it excelled at, such as multimedia. Their plans are all clearly laid out in their lawsuit against Microsoft, if you care to read it.
The result, predictably, was that BeOS had no applications. Running that nifty teapot demo got a little old, and nobody felt compelled to pay for it.
Clearly someone who never used BeOS for more than a couple days (or past 1997). BeOS had plenty of decent applications, many of them cheap or free. GoBe productive is a great office application, for example. Ever used it?
And how did Windows get so popular? Ahh, I forgot, they weren't going up against any entrenched monopolists in the desktop market. Apple's only still around because they started at the same time as Microsoft, and could build up a loyal userbase, which sustained them long enough to build a niche.
Be was only ever TRYING to build a niche based on multimedia, they never had that niche market, though. It takes time. Hard to do when an 800lb. gorilla is using illegal tactics to stall you.
If you're going to make a new commercial desktop OS, forge an alliance with Adobe etc and have app makers lined up BEFOREHAND. The game console makers know this.
Yes, let's turn to the game console makers for examples of great businesses! Need I list all the failed game console makers in the past decade? It's a fairly high percentage of all game console makers!
Besides, I'm sure it would have been cheap to get a company like Adobe to port their huge application (Photoshop) to an OS with a tiny market. Great business strategy... if your business has billions to burn.
"And like that
"Be will be a lesson to those who hadn't already learned from NeXT, Amiga, etc."
:)
Amiga had a chance, and failed because Commodore mis-managed and under-promoted it. The fan base was there, the tech was there (at the time), and there were probably more apps then BeOS ever had.
NeXT failed because the hardware was dumb. It started with a 4bit grey-scale display when EGA, VGA, and Amiga graphics were not only better, but cheaper. NeXT boxes only had CD-ROMs for removable media. The only way they could share data was on a network, and only the far more expensive machines were online. Worst of all, they cost $5k with an academic discount, or $10k without. A fully loaded PC or Amiga was $4k or less and had apps, a floppy drive, and could talk to anything.
Be failed because it has no reason to exist anymore. It would have been great before DirectX 7 or accelerated XFree86. The one thing they tried to do better than anyone else was being done well enough for free by Linux and *BSD.
Amiga was a lesson in marketing. NeXT was a lesson in timing (we weren't ready). BeOS was a lesson in timing too (we already had it). Three very different lessons that I'm glad _I_ didn't directly pay for.
1) Apple's core market still is publishing, not media, and NeXT's fancy PostScript and the fact that it could, umm, print and BeOS couldn't played a huge factor. Oh, and OS X has lower audio latencies than BeOS anyway.
2) The major cause of delay in the release of OS X was the need for the Carbon API layer to appease devs with 10 years of legacy Toolbox code. BeOS wouldn't have obliviated this need, and their super-threaded system might have even made it harder.
The other big delay was the Aqua UI which was created purely for marketing reasons. Again, BeOS didn't solve that problem.