We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.
Apple saw this, so didn't want to pay as much as they might have if it were selling well on it's own.
So Apple ended up going with NeXT "instead of plan Be" as it were.
When there were no takers for a free way to have your hardware stand out from the pack, it was hard to imagine a reason for every single OEM in a very crowded field to back away that didn't involve antitrust shenanigans.
OEMs had an option, yes they would had to pay more for licenses, but no one pointed them a gun, or did visits mafia style to forbid them to sell other systems.
Under these terms, it was suicide for OEMs to offer anything except “only Windows”. I was actually working for another company whose software was killed by Microsoft by a similar “or else” threat from Microsoft at the time.
Microsoft was a bully doing (likely) illegal things, except the FTC wasn’t doing its job.
(kind of like Dell does with their Linux lappies)
Also, some of the time Microsoft simply forbade dual booting as a condition for OEM licensing.
Was it just a strategic misstep for Be to not sue at the time, when it would have mattered? Why did the DOJ care about MS bundling a web browser w/ its OS but not care about MS preventing OEMs from selling any other OS than Windows? The seems wildly, clearly more anticompetitive to me!
And why does no one care about this stuff anymore? Not only does iOS bundle a browser, you cannot install any other browser (you can install alternative UI frontends for webkit, but you can’t ship your own js/html etc engine). Not too mention that they can veto any software on the platform for any reason...
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Japan-make-their-own-brand-O...
?
Jobs was able to squeeze Microsoft. In a way I don't think any one else would or could.
Referring to Microsoft outright stealing Apple's IP and Gates' subsequent settlement. The $150m investment. The commitment to maintain Office on Mac. Forever license to all of Microsoft's API, enabling Mail.app to have pretty great integration with Exchange, for example.
BeOS was probably the better tech. But Jobs had the better strategies and the better team.
Compare this to Jonathan Schwartz cotemporaneous mismanagement of Sun's amazing IP, snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Schwartz just wasn't a bare knuckled brawler like Jobs.
I used the hell out of Java, but most of their other tech was in the weird quadrant of cool stuff that I won’t use. Something about their fit and finish always left me cold. Or if not that, price point.
All conjecture. Had I finished my Java port (BeKaffe), the world would run on BeOs :).
The real win was a mobile future sans Microsoft. I doubt smart phones would be what they are today if not for the iPhone, and the iPhone required huge resources and a maniac cracking the whip. Would Jony Ive leave a failing Apple and work with Steve? If not, would we even have the iPod let alone the iPhone?
On the plus side, Nokia might have still been around.
Around enough to still have a good networking business, and be the owner of Bell Labs.
Fans think they're helping. If there's a hardware product then as a fan I should buy it right? Well, no, that's a subsidised development toolkit. Every unit that ships is VC sunk in the hope you'll write like Photoshop or Mosaic or 1-2-3 or something and create a market for this new system. When you instead compile two demo apps, call the support line to ask how to plug a mouse in, and tell all your friends to buy one as well, you are in fact not helping.
This is also because Be's original plan says competing with Windows is suicide (it was). They're going to build a system which is NOT a competitor for Windows, it's a whole separate environment. Maybe you have a Windows PC to do billing and surf that new Web, but in your studio you have a BeOS system and it doesn't matter that it can't print because that's not what it's for.
Be shouldn't have made it to the turn of the century, nowhere close. In 1998 the investors should have said we're sorry, there isn't money for this to continue Jean-Louis, better luck next time, and turn off the lights. BeOS gets sold off to whoever is in the market for pennies. But they got "lucky" they were in the right place at the right time. In 1999 you could raise an IPO for a dog turd so long as the offering paperwork said "Internet" on it and you were based on the US West Coast. The institutions got out, those fans who'd squandered the company's money and opportunity years earlier got in to replace them, and they all lost their shirts. In the process Be Inc. bought itself an extra couple of years runway.
(Edited to fix name)
tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room, surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from under a tree.
If Be had managed to capture that, I think it would have been an amazing time. Imagine if SGI had pulled off the first titanium, unibody laptop, designed specifically for 3D. Would Alien-ware?
If there had been a BeLaptop, things might have been a lot different in 2000/2001, when things started to look very, very interesting.
I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,,
More info for the curious: https://www.macworld.com/article/2918513/the-powerbook-g4-ti...
Like the OP, for me the tiBook was a defining moment. A unix laptop, and it also looked good? Easy, immediate purchase.
http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0012.html
https://books.google.de/books?id=wDlUmfY9nQsC&pg=PT11&lpg=PT...
Additionally there were UNIX laptops from NatureTech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dios0v0n9eY
and Tadpole
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbo...
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/01/sparcbook-3000st-the-co...
So no, "I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,, " isn't how history went.
Other vendors were already at it, while Apple was trying to make Copland work and not being so successful with A/UX.
None of your vendors were considered viable - far, far too expensive. However, Linux on x86 laptops at the time was amazing - portable Linux.
So when Apple joined that party, and made the hardware neat, it was an easy switch. Portable, PPC-based, Unix. This was a delightful moment.
Of course, I still have a Linux laptop around, and 20 years later .. I consider moving back to it, 100%. The ride has been good with Apple, but the horizon doesn't look too great ..
What Linux laptops? It hardly worked properly in most desktops.
The first laptop I managed to get Linux working at all was a Toshiba in 1999, while these systems were being sold since 1992.
For most of the 90's I was using Linux in some capacity, professionally as well as personally.
I also had a Linux laptop (Winbook, Sony, and then Sceptre..) on which I did a lot of development and for which my carefully selected hardware did in fact work, just fine - it was certainly viable as a dev platform, and for us Unix programmers at the time, a small and light Linux laptop was far more preferable to the pizzaboxes that had to be carried in the trunk .. or more, bigger iron that you would stay at the office to use, instead of having at home.
The point is Linux really did okay in the 90's, in terms of providing Unix devs a way of working away from the computer room. I think this is an underappreciated mechanism behind Linux' success over the years .. you could carry Linux with you pretty easily, but this was not the case for Solaris, Irix, etc.
That was the time period when ordinary users could be persuaded to pay money for their operating systems and major upgrades.