Be Inc. IPO launched

arielb writes "Be, Inc. is now trading actively on the Nasdaq exchange.. Their ticker symbol is BEOS." They announced at $6 and went up a little.

Comments

Long-term loser

[Skyshadow]

Okay, let's be honest here folks.

Be's stock might do well in the short run, but dumping your hard-earned saving into it is a big gamble. Let's face it, they have no long-term prospects.

I mean, this is just another company foolishly deciding to compete with Microsoft by MS's rules in a game that MS has already beaten every other contender in. If Linux proves anything, it proves that the only way to brawl with Microsoft and survive is to change the rules of the game - to (forgive me) think different.

Besides, Be has no long-term prospects and they don't have an established niche in the market yet. To top it off, the market they claim to be after (graphic design, etc) is one where the user base is infamously loyal to their current platform.

I know I'll probably get flamed 'cause BeOS is a good system, but anyone over the age of 15 should realize that that's not enough (remember MacOS versus DOS back in the old days? In retrospect, which was really better? Yet which one is used on 90% of PCs now?). Trust me, the only hope that Be has in the next couple of years is that they'll be bought out by someone big - maybe IBM or a company like AOL.

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Quit fooling yourself

[Skyshadow]

Too good to go away? Isn't that a bit optimistic?

Let's examine this: Be has effectively 0% of the market, they have only a few programs available for their OS, the market they're aiming at (graphic design, layout, etc) is already unreasonably loyal to their current platform, and they're pursuing a typical closed-source business model in a market utterly owned by MS.

Maybe I'm not seeing it? Look, $61 million isn't *that* much money when you're talking about a fairly big business, especially a business that's been operating without any income for the last 4-5 years.

Besides, what makes them different from all the other "better" systems that will let them beat Windows? I think Microsoft has already proven that nobody can stand against them when they play by the traditional rules in the OS market.

I'm not saying that BeOS is a gonner for sure, I'm just saying that they're a real long shot. I hope nobody out there makes it more than a small part of their portfolio, 'cause after a few short-term gains they're liable to lose their shirts.

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