OSNews

Your whole comment was excellent Billy, as always

Thanks!


I think one of the biggest problems with the "geek" community is growing up with stars in their eyes regarding Jobs & Woz (or Hewitt & Packard, or Gates & company, or whoever). The belief that two guys in their garage can create something cool and shake up the world with it. But what they often don't seem to grasp is that Jobs & Woz (to use them as an example), created an industry. They made something new that hadn't existed before. These days, companies like Be compete with huge, established companies who are in the same business. And that already have the investment of millions of customers.

The BeOS, as cool as it was, wasn't that different from other operating systems. It wasn't a completely new industry; it was a nicer operating system, which was an established industry. Yet a lot of its fans apparently expected the world to say, "Wow, that scheduler's a little neater, the API is cleaner, and the icons are cuter. Ok, you've convinced us...we'll throw away the trillions of dollars we've invested in this other platform and adopt yours!!" That's like saying, "Ok, we don't like this one thing about English, so we're going to change it and translate every book ever written." For people to be willing to throw away such investment, the advantages of the new platform have to be tremendous. Face it: the BeOS' advantages weren't tremendous back in the day, and they sure as hell aren't by today's standards.

Moreover, I doubt that too many people really care about the operating system, other than its not getting in your way (by crashing, not having drivers, not supporting applications, etc.) other than the capabilities it brings to its applications. Love or hate Apple, I think they realize this. They go, "Hmmm, a web browser is a crucial portion of a modern computer and the user experience with those existing on our platform isn't good. Let's deliver (what will hopefully be) a great experience to the user." Or they do it with e-mail, or digital photography, or whatever. But I'll bet that Apple has more people working on Safari than yellowTab has employees, period. There's just no way that yellowTab can compete with that.

So what is yellowTab left with? An aging OS that can't run most software in the world (including not being able to run a decent web browser at all decently), whose applications tend to lack even basic polish (and this is getting worse, not better, with time), and for which, in the few areas where it still is technically superior, the features aren't particularly compelling. Who's the market?

If it were me with BeOS source code, I'd attempt to do something radically different from what Apple and Microsoft are doing. What exactly, I don't know--I haven't thought that much about it. But the Apple I didn't succeed because it tried to take on IBM's mainframe business. To the extent that Be had a differentiating angle (personally, I've always thought the sole reason for Be's creation was to be bought by Apple), it was that it did media well in the days when competing systems didn't, and that it focused on bringing incredible power to the user in an easy package. Nowadays, as it stands, Zeta is worse than Windows or the Mac for media. And because of lack of polish and lack of talented engineers/UI designers working together, it's worse in terms of "easy package." By contrast, Apple and Microsoft are both strongly focused on it (Apple especially, in my opinion). Zeta simply cannot compete with that "differentiating angle"; if your army's outnumbered and outsupplied, you don't lead a forward charge.

Yet yellowTab hasn't bothered to seek out a new angle, something that could leverage what little technological advantage they still have. Instead, they're adding small applications to an OS that no sane person would use for such applications, anyway. It just doesn't make sense. They're obviously trying to appeal to the few BeOS diehards who say, "Man, I'd love to still use the BeOS [for reasons that are beyond me considering the awesome things competing systems can do], but I just won't be able to without a few more abilities." Great, so you string the small and ever-shrinking group of users who use BeOS "just because" along for a few years, and then what? The company folds and the game is over. They can't seriously be crazy enough to think that they can be successful by making and selling a product that to most users is "the exact same thing as Windows or the Mac, except with way fewer features and worse applications", can they? Rather than trying to fight Apple and Microsoft, they'd be better off trying something radically different, something that the other companies simply can't do. If it doesn't work, fine...they tried. But at least they'd have a chance. Where they're at now is playing chicken in a Mini against a freight train and hoping that somehow they survive.