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Comment by faefox | Hacker News Reader

Lord, what I would give to see Haiku gain real traction. BeOS was something truly special and I often wonder what the tech landscape would look like today had Apple chosen to acquire them instead of NeXT.

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Or if Microsoft hadn't used anti-competitive practices to ensure a system like BeOS would have trouble getting traction. Bundling agreements with OEMs and whatnot.

>Lord, what I would give to see Haiku gain real traction

I think the only thing we can give right now is our time and money. Porting applications, porting to different hardware platforms, spreading the word, etc.

BeOS started on its own hardware where PC bundling agreements didn't matter. The real problem was that by the time it came out, Windows and PC hardware was good enough.

OEMs were also to blame, they could chose not to take part on those deals, it isn't as if Microsoft gangs were visiting them talking about "how nice the OEMs are and it would be a shame to see something happening to them".

Indeed. It’s interesting that apparently there was room in the marketplace for another commercial consumer desktop operating system — we can see that it’s true with the rise of chrome OS. We could maybe have had that competition 10 years earlier.

I don't know if there was room back then. Suppose Microsoft made no agreements with OEMs. I guess OEMs would have to agree on some open standards to fairly support a broad range of OSes efficiently, which would've been hard but doable in theory. Even then, apps would be OS-specific, and one OS would win the market, at which point hardly anyone would have a reason to use the others. Cause the apps matter far more than the OS to end users.

And now the web browser matters more than the native apps or OS to many users. And Chromium has dominance there.

Yeah, I guess you're right that the necessary prerequisite for alternative OSs like ChromeOS to be viable for consumers was the Web eating software for most tasks. I think most people doing business or personal computing on a laptop today are doing 100% of those tasks either in a browser, in a first-party app the OS vendor made, or in a simple Electron app that just wraps the webapp (Like Slack and Spotify). Obviously not true 25 years ago. It started coming true right before Chromebooks started coming out.

Arguably it's also the only reason Macs became viable for consumers instead of dying off. Imagine if you couldn't use any webapps on a Mac, nor "apps" that were built with Electron.

I've used a Mac from 2003 onwards, and it was rough in some ways before large web apps became common. Microsoft was seemingly throwing Apple a bone by making Office for Mac, otherwise I think the Mac would've been non-viable. And also Age of Empires II, which later on became Windows-only.

There's a good chance that Apple wouldn't exist today if it went down the BeOS road. Not because BeOS was bad (I liked it and played with it for a while back in the day and with Haiku more recently), but going with NeXT got Apple Steve Jobs back, and that's what really saved them.

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