Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that Be failed. I think they were a victim of Microsoft's aggressive anti-competitive activities in the late-1990s, combined with Apple deciding to bring back Steve Jobs via the acquisition of NeXT (making Apple a serious competitor in the same segment that Be was targeting -- multimedia and realtime applications). Ultimately, they prevailed in winning about $24M from Microsoft, but that was after the company had shut down. I presume the winnings went to Palm. Super cool to see Haiku continuing to develop. No doubt agentic coding is making it far easy for enthusiasts to improve and maintain projects like Haiku and I look forward to seeing where this project goes. You never know...

View on HN

They were never going to compete with Microsoft even if MS hadn’t screwed them (which MS definitely did). At the time, MS was invincible in the enterprise market. Be’s only path to success was with Apple. Jean-Louis Gassée was negotiating the buy-out with Apple but he wanted more than Apple was willing to pay and Jobs was the key acquihire at Next, before people started talking about “acquihire” as a concept. Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t going to acquire both Be and Next.

Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0]

There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow.

0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/

Tune Tracker is sill(?) around, they moved to Haiku a long time ago.

It looks like it just moved to Mac earlier this year(!?)

I recall that they had one OEM who wanted to install BeOS as a preinstalled option Hitachi), but then Microsoft threatened to raise Windows license prices in retaliation.

A little search gives a reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.intern...

Be was pretty close from being acquired by Apple instead of NeXT. It was also founded by an ex-Apple employee (Jean-Louis Gassée).

MacOSX would be really different today if it were based on BeOS instead of NeXT...

No beachballs

I strongly suspect Apple wouldn't be here had they picked Be.

What NeXT brought was exceptional developer tools, not to mention Steve Jobs.

No Steve Jobs likely would have meant no iPod, iPhone, etc.

The butterfly effect gets insane with that one, but it's kind of an interesting alternate future to think about.

Probably much worse. First because (and I say this is a BeOS fan at the time) it was a single-user system without much security. Second, because it's likely that Apple would have sunk further without Steve Jobs.

When they had to shift to x86 there was more to it than MS being jerks. At the time, hardware companies would write the device drivers for Windows, but nothing else. If you were an alternative OS you had to provide your own. And since the commodity x86 world was such a clusterfuck of barely compatible hardware, Be had to spend a ton of effort just keeping up with that noise.

Linux had a similar problem but had the advantage of open source. Random people would cobble together support for things and stick it online.

To that last point, they do not accept any AI code to be used in the project.

I get it, many times I have seen stuff that is function all but very slow, considering Haiku can run fine on a Pentium 2, I can see why they wouldn't want that.

They knew Microsoft was monopolistic. They should have planned around it by making an x86 BeBox. (Which still would have failed because they didn't have the marketing budget.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com