I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten years ago was BeOS.

It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market).

If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to Apple, they could have been a contender.

Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line has quite a lot of interesting observations about BeOS during its prime. http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html