Star Palm Acquires Be's IP, Be is Closing Down
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 16th Aug 2001 17:54 UTC, submitted by Irfon-Kim Ahmad
BeOS & Derivatives This Press Release today is everywhere on the net. Palm is acquiring Be's technology, hardware and their software engineering force for $11 million USD. Please notice that they are buying Be's IP, not the company itself.
Our take: Well, at least something happened. I think it is safe to assume that Be will be now closed down (the closing down of the company is pretty much certain, according to the press release "Be's board of directors has approved the transaction, and the winding-up of Be's operating business following the closing") as they now own nothing (except if they want to enter another markets or.. become car or pencil dealers). Being myself a BeOS advocate, user and developer for several years now, I am sad to see this twist and what it probably means for the BeOS. While Palm has not stated what they want to do with Be's technology, my guess is that they do not care about the BeOS and the Desktop OS world. Slashdot has it right this time: I believe Palm mostly bought the engineering force, to create something new and continue make their living in the PDA market. Palm is entering the Desktop through BeOS you say? Yeah, right. I will believe it when I see it. In my mind, the only way to see a BeOS R6 is if there will be a third party licensee that is interesting to license BeOS and do something productive with it (assuming that Palm will be willing to allow that). Palm does not have what it takes to drive a desktop OS neither BeOS can be open sourced (too much licensed source code all over the place).
Update: Not a crucial update to the story, just trying to add a bit of spicy humour. We just had an anonymous sending us in this picture, while BeDoper has its regular, humouristic take on the latest happenings in the Be world.
Update2: ZDNews writes: "However, Palm said it has no plans to further develop the Be operating system as a standalone OS."
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"it's the only OS, that in my mind *could* pose a real threat to MS's dominance" <BR><BR> Sadly, history is littered with better-quality-products that failed for one reason or another. I don't see how the BeOS could pose that much of a threat to Microsoft's dominance; the world has invested billions upon billions of dollars into the Wintel platform and they're not going to throw it all away very easily. Quite frankly, why do you think Microsoft hasn't gone back and "started from scratch" anytime since Windows NT? How long did it take for NT to be adopted, and that's *with* its general Win9x compatibility? <BR><BR> The BeOS is great technology and a lovely little OS, but it doesn't offer too much that's so remarkably new that it changes the face of computing. Nothing compared to the original Macintosh, certainly, or the advent of the internet. Doing things faster and more stably can't really overcome the incredible barriers to entry that exist in the OS world. Compare that to Linux; I wouldn't exactly call Linux a stunning success at this point in time, but what it does have is a radical new development and ownership model.