Be Inc. yesterday formally completed its takeover of PalmSource with the appointment of Jean-Louise Gassee to the Palm board. Former Be executives now hold the crucial positions of influence at the troubled PDA company. The article is at TheRegister.
Be Inc. Completes Takeover of Palm
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’m proud that I have followed the BeOS story for so long. While it would’ve been nice if it succeeded on the desktop, it will do very nicely in the pockets of millions. They now have the best OS designers you can get. The era of the Claudia Schiffer edition is over.
… next the world!!!!
At first I actually thought the article was tongue-in-cheek. Guess it’s my own fault for not paying attention.
Still you can’t keep a good man/good men down as the saying goes.
I wish them nothing but the best of luck.
Here’s hoping for (affordable!) BeOS-derived/PalmOS-inspired pocket masterpieces
Looks like JLG gets another chance, and BE rises again.
Hopefully, this’ll mean real Character Recognition. I don’t want to bag on Plam too much, but the Apple Newton let me write anywhere on the screen in my own handwriting *years* before palm even started. WTF is their fascination with Graffitti?
> WTF is their fascination with Graffitti?
It works. And it works well. Unlike Newton’s CR.
maybe finally PalmSource might be willing to license to beunited or help OpenBeOS or something or pull a Steve Jobs on Palm.
> maybe finally PalmSource might be willing to license
Dream on. There is no BeOS for PalmSource anymore.
“it’s funny, laugh” ???
can only wish…
> “it’s funny, laugh” ???
Yes.
Me too!
All in due time.
ciao
yc
more than likely, it will be phased out, so that, they do not have to pay royalties to HP (or was it Xerox, i forget). Just look at handspring, they’ve moved to a mini keyboard.
personally, I like graffiti, and can write in it faster than using the onscreen keyboard, and I’ll guess faster the typeing with only two thumbs.
as for handwriting recognition, i doubt any machine would ever be able to read my handwriting. I barely can
soon we’ll hear that there is a version of Steinberg for Palm? There’s already MGI Photosuite for Palm you know
of what jobs did tat apple.
compare it to apple ?
may be if they also come out with a desktop os — but that aint happening anytime .
Should we expect the same vague PR as we had from Be ?
And ‘fuck you, developers’ attitude ?
Vlad, while I know you don’t like me, I agree with you on that assesement. Hah.
(Your email address doesn’t work btw. I tried to email you the other day.)
I was refering to how jobs got back to the top….though it was through being CEO to the chairman. JLG is on a similar path, and with in a year…CEO.
I’ve always suspected that JLG’s plan for Be from the beginning was to garner some success using legions of devoted geeks and then to sell out in the end.
Get a nice golden parachute and then… start over again. Maybe the Be execs can get some really *sexy* technology into “Palm 6” — sexy enough to interest a buyer. Who knows, maybe it’ll even be in the name of maximizing return for shareholders. Blech.
…why didn’t Microsoft by Be? Why?
Ohhh Nooooo !!
It’s starting already.
“Palm reports expected loss”
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-939265.html
You just might find the Desktop is the next market for the PDA makers.
If, as other threads on this site suggest, the Tablet PC really is the way forward.. well who knows what a PC with touchscreen input really needs. Microsoft……… or Palm?
If they could emulate the windows RDP link for remote desktop, Palm could make a Mira-style pad – and probably make it lighter, more user friendly and more power efficient too…
Hopefully we’ll see something great from that.
Has anyone done a comparison of the footprint of Beia/beos with the cost of flash memory over time?
In other words what is the dollar content of flash per palm handheld today? Is it $5, $10, $15?
How much memory will that money ($5, 10, $15 whatever it is) buy in mid 2003, when Palm OS 6 is due). If the answer is large enough to hold Beia then you might have an answer as to what will be done with Beia/beos right there. So does anyone know the dollar content of flash in palm devices today and how much memory that will buy in mid 2003?
Ok, for the record, the LATER Newtons had great handwriting recognition (HWR for short). I’m talking the MP2000 and MP2100.
If you’re willing to practice and learn graffiti, then it is pretty good. Better still is writing directly on an extended screen (the newest Sony Clie and the old Handera 330 can do this). Graffiti is TONS easier when you can SEE what you are WRITING.
To those who aren’t used to The Register’s unique style, I shall explain that that article was both funny AND serious. Funny, because of the irony and parallel with Apple/NeXT. Serious, because many Be people ARE running Palmsource, and again, because of the parallels with Apple/NeXT. And also, The Register has often been kind to the Be and their OS in their articles.
That’s all for now.
–JM
OMG this is a disaster. Oh nooooooo…
With JLG at the helm of Palm, you can plan on selling short Palm stock, make yourself a million so you can afford to buy the next generation Pocket PC that emulates a Palm.
HeHeHeHe.
As per Palm conference call, they have new licensees!
They have a new Board of Directors including Jean-Louis Gassee!
Exciting new product cycle coming in the fall!
Palm is in Good shape, I look forward to seeing PalmSource as an independent company.
ciao
yc
Well, JLG has a talent to ruin things. First at Apple he canned project to port MacOS to x86 (and at that time the entire OS was already running on Intel hardware), then it fscked up at Be, Inc. by first refusing Apple’s offer to buy Be (they bought NeXT together with SJ instead), then abandoning desktop and going the way of BeIA, and now we’ll see him fubar PalmOS. Nice going, the “fearless leader”.
And a note to Eugenia: just try handwriting recognition on a Newton 2×00 or even model 1×0 with OS 2.x, and you’ll never ever want to go back to the utter crap that Graffiti is.
> Looks like JLG gets another chance…
> Hopefully we’ll see something great from that.
I don’t think so: JLG is a $$$ burner nothing else.
First creating the Hardware for his OS and have nobody that wanted to buy it. Too bad!
After that come with a x86 version of BeOS, but much too late for the market. Too bad!
He wanted too much money for his BeOS from Apple so they picked Jobs and his OS. Too bad!
After running behind the market (and don’t know what to do, BeOS or BeIE or BeOS or…? ) he missed the chance to shape the future of computing. Too bad!
Hopefully some good guys out there can pick up the ideas behind BeOS and shape the future of computing with OpenBeOS, Cosmoe or whatever… but we alredy lost 10 years. Too bad!
And last, hopefully Palm keeps the outstanding former Be engineers and kick out JLG otherwise…. too bad!
Even though much of this article is based on facts, there are so many minor mistakes in this article that I find it hard to take The Register seriously:
“Palm’s hardware division is led by Steve Sakoman, former Be CEO.”
– To the best of my knowledge, Steve is working in the OS company, PalmSource, not the hardware side. I believe he reports to David Nagel. Further, he was CTO at Be, not CEO.
“Be’s former chief architect George Hoffman, is now Palmsource’s chief architect.”
– This is an exaggeration. George was the head of the graphics team at Be, and later a director. There hasn’t been a lead architect since Benoit Schillings unofficially retired from the post to work on special projects.
“The previous OS team wasn’t short of talent or good ideas.”
– (This was referring to existing Palm employees) This statement is rediculous. The reason for buying Be’s intellectual property was the realization that Palm lacked the technology and the people in-house to do a next generation product. These people fear C++. They don’t have virtual memory. They think small and aim low. And that’s why the current PalmOS looks like a student project compared to Qt/Embedded or WinCE. It’s also why the best PalmOS devices out there to date come from Sony, who did the high resolution screens, Memory Stick support, etc. themselves.
“Over at Danger Inc, a small cluster of former Be staff, including legendary Q&A hacker ‘Baron’, have written the small RTOS that runs the HipTop communicator.”
– Where to start? Q&A means “questions and answers”. QA means “quality assurance”, which is what Baron Arnold did at Be as the QA Manager. Furthermore, how is he a hacker? He didn’t write the OS. He’s a professional tester (one of the best I’ve met, for the record).
So yes, it’s quite amazing that ex-Be employees have established themselves so well at PalmSource, but the quality of Andrew’s reporting at The Register frankly sucks.
Exciting new product cycle coming in the fall!
Crap, if YC starts talking up a company YOU KNOW IT’S DOOMED!
Good thing I don’t own Palm stock.. Get out while you can!!
fooks
There are lessons to be learned from Be’s failure.
Just as a side note, that vastly improved handwriting recognition the last Newton’s had is supposed to show up in OS X 10.2 as InkWell, according to Jobs.
more than likely, it will be phased out, so that, they do not have to pay royalties to HP (or was it Xerox, i forget). Just look at handspring, they’ve moved to a mini keyboard.
For Treos, there is an option to buy every model without the thumb keyboard and with the grafiti area.
…why didn’t Microsoft by Be? Why?
Because then BeUnited wouldn’t even bother asking for a license of BeOS, and therefor cease to exist. Also, OBOS would have been long sued for trademark violation.
Palm is in Good shape, I look forward to seeing PalmSource as an independent company.
I expect Palm to be the next Psion. Psion dies, Symbian lives. Palm dies, PalmSource lives.
…then it fscked up at Be, Inc. by first refusing Apple’s offer to buy Be (they bought NeXT together with SJ instead)…
I doubt Apple would be alive without Jobs. Notice how he picked up Apple without releasing Apple’s version of OpenStep (OS X). I doubt he could do that.
Just as a side note, that vastly improved handwriting recognition the last Newton’s had is supposed to show up in OS X 10.2 as InkWell, according to Jobs.
And how would this relate to the topic?
—–
Frankly I have been very anti-Palm because of their crappy OS, even when I was once a anti-MS troll (thankfully no here). Because of their crappy OS. But then, that might change… But I’m still skeptical, BeIA was slow (on a eVilla, accroading to Usenet posters), would Palm OS “6” (poor thing they can’t make it Palm OS X, hehe..) be fast?
>I expect Palm to be the next Psion. Psion dies,
>Symbian lives. Palm dies, PalmSource lives.
Psion are alive and well, all they did was pull out of the handheld market as it was becoming too commoditised.
>But then, that might change… But I’m still
>skeptical, BeIA was slow (on a eVilla, accroading
>to Usenet posters), would Palm OS “6” (poor thing
>they can’t make it Palm OS X, hehe..) be fast?
eVilla was slow because Sony put in an tall display and the display had to be rotated before it could be displayed, this crippled the performance of the system, not BeIA.
That said even 400MHz ARMs will likely be slower than the (IIRC) ~150MHz Cyrix CPU eVialla had and thats before power saving considerations are made.
Actually some iPac users are finding 400MHz ARMs are slower than 200MHz ARMs but thats another story…
JLG was elected to the palmsource board. He is not the CEO or even a full-time employee. Just a note here. He was also on the board of palm (correct me if i am wrong) during Palm’s amazing growth period
JLG did not ruin Be, inc. He made some mistakes yes but the company’s real downfall was underestimating the extent to which microblows i mean microsoft would illegally manipulate its monopoly. MS went far beyond common business tactics. they even exceeded business bullying tactics.
All in all, JLG led a company on what amounts to a shoe-string budget (for those type of things) and built one of the best operating systems out there. I don’t think the focus shift was a choice. It struck me as a last option to avoid the death of the company. As for selling out to apple. Didn’t Next get a lot more than JLG had asked for? Ultimiately apple needed a Steve jobs and no one but steve jobs. That “os” purchase boiled down to a CEO purchase.
Former Be executives now hold the crucial positions of influence at the troubled PDA company.
They’re now experienced at failing… Palm should be a cakewalk for them.
“Ok… First we have to put out some press releases denying our imminent demise. Then we secretly begin liquidating stock via ebay. Finally, we put out many press releases blaming Microsoft for our financial difficulties and lack of market penetration. Oh! And if anyone offers to buy our company for a modest profit, we state we want 5x the amount and then whine about not taking it in 2 years when we’re moving out of our fancy office complex”
I’d forgotten how many armchair CEOs there are floating about these forums :o)
Fooks, I don’t recognize your alias. Are you from the old Yahoo BEOS board? What was your alias there?
Yes, I trade Palm. Thinking long term…
If you’re from the old Yahoo BeOS board then you know why PalmSource has great potentials. Moreover, it has good financial backing, strong HandHeld market, Great engineers, and now a strong BOD. You see, sometimes you have to risk it big to win it BIG!
This is round 2 folks!
Live Long and Prosper!
ciao
yc
<quote>
JLG did not ruin Be, inc. He made some mistakes yes but the company’s real downfall was underestimating the extent to which microblows i mean microsoft would illegally manipulate its monopoly.
</quote>
So who exactly underestimated such an obvious thing as presense of MS? Wasn’t it Mr. Gassee? Did he really hope that MS will get out of Be’s way on the desktop? It’s always easy to blame someone else for own mistakes. Russians say: A bad dancer always blames his balls.
Anyway, Palm 5.0+ is too little too late. Pals OS soon will become irrelevant (hint: Symbian OS).
No, the problem with Be Inc. was that they burned 50-60 million dollars on a powerpc based system and then ran out of vc money. Then they were forced to IPO to get funding for an intel based system. The damage was done in the early to mid 90’s.
QNX started with a desktop OS, but after a couple of years of losses in the EARLY 80’s (before Microsoft was really big), they moved onto the embedded OS business. The mighty GE knows when to call it quits when they sold their consumer electronics (ie. TV/VCR) to Thomson after they faced losses against the Japanese. Even Microsoft (with their 40 BILLION dollar cash reserve) knows when to call it quits on webtv development.
The real downfall was that Be Inc. never learned when to call it quits. Lose money on the first couple of years of founding the business, that’s normal and not shameful at all. Lose money for the 3rd/4th year, shame on the management for not changing their business plans. Lose money for the 5th/6th year, shame on the board of directors for not pressing on management to change their business plans. Lose money for the 7th/8th/9th/10th/11th year, shame on the board to try to get their money back by doing an IPO on a hopeless company with a clueless management, shame on the investment bankers for hyping the stock and shame on the the individual investors for buying the hype.
When you consider that only 25% of powerpc chips manufactured are used for desktop computers and that the remaining 75% of the powerpc chips are used in embedded devices — Be could have been a nice little profitable outfit (30-40 employees in their pre-ipo days) selling embedded BeOS for the embedded powerpc market since the mid 90’s.
Nicholas Blachford said: eVilla was slow because Sony put in an tall display and the display had to be rotated before it could be displayed, this crippled the performance of the system, not BeIA.
OK WAIT A SECOND! I’ll admit the only thing I know about eVilla is what I read. Never used one, never touched one, never even saw one in person. However, I did follow BeOS since I heard the first rumors of an X86 version. I also am a programmer and generally know what I am talking about. SO TRUST ME when I say that the orientation of your screen IS NOT a performance killer. I liked BeOS as much as the next guy but blaming performance on screen orientation is just absurd. To imply that something so simple as a portrait oriented screen brought the performance of BeIA to its proverbial knees is complete hogwash.
Its a simple change of resolution in the Video Card. To a video card 1024×768 is the same as 768×1024. Its transparent to the OS and all applications.
Yes, if the eVilla was buggy and slow there is most certainly a more sinister culprit: A fabulous desktop OS hacked up to run in 8 Megs of ROM as a stripped down internet appliance. The fact it was pulled off at all is amazing. The fact that it was buggy and slow had more to do with the compressed filesystem than screen orientation (can you say MS DriveSpace?)
I would completely agree if it was just a change of resolution.
My understanding is that it was a normal monitor rotated by 90 degrees. In this case you have to rotate the display by either changing the electronics (very expensive) or by doing the rotation in software. Rotation in software may not be computationally expensive but it will eat large chunks of memory bandwidth.
I was very surprised that Sony was dumb enough to do this, if indeed they did. Anyone got any info on whether this is actually true?
Yes – the display in the eVilla was software rotated so that what would have been a 1024×768 landscape display became a 768×1024 portrait display. Folks at Be (notably Pierre) spent some serious thought on this problem and came up with an efficient and elegant solution. However it still meant ‘work’ had to be done by the CPU. Thus using CPU cycles that alternatively would have been available for apps/other tasks.
The rationale for the rotated screen was that Sony had the ability to make a lot of the monitors cheaply and this seemed like a ‘novel’ use for manufacturing capacity. The original progenitors of the eVilla project were people from the display division at Sony.
OK WAIT A SECOND! I’ll admit the only thing I know about eVilla is what I read. Never used one, never touched one, never even saw one in person.
I put my hands on one at CES when Sony debuted the beast. It was a stock 14″ display with ordinary, very inexpensive video adaptor hardware.
However, I did follow BeOS since I heard the first rumors of an X86 version. I also am a programmer and generally know what I am talking about. SO TRUST ME when I say that the orientation of your screen IS NOT a performance killer.
It certainly can be, if you use the CPU to rotate the screen in software (which is what I believe the initial poster was trying to say). I think this is how it works; if I’m wrong, feel free to shoot me. (I know you’re a programmer, so please forgive the remedial krap below, which is primarily for others who don’t know how things work under the hood.)
Most displays draw top to bottom, left to right, period, and graphic adaptors and OS’s respond accordingly. The thing in the top left corner is the first to be drawn.
If you want to take a stock 14″ monitor and make it “tall” rather than “wide,” you can’t just pick it up, turn it sideways, and configure the driver to 600(w)x800(t). You’ve moved the “top left” corner to the top right.
The OS must construct an 800×600 image and send that to the screen, such that everything displayed is 90 degrees rotated. In other words, the physical screen is still drawing left to right, top to bottom, but from where the user sits the electron gun begins its refresh journey at the top right, moving to the bottom right, then jumping to the top to begin drawing the nextmost left vertical row. The screen thinks its drawing normally.
That means, if you have ordinary consumer grade hardware, everything the OS draws has to be rotated in software. (Custom hardware would’ve driven up the cost way past the consumer pain threshold…the eVil was already expensive as it was.)
I liked BeOS as much as the next guy but blaming performance on screen orientation is just absurd. To imply that something so simple as a portrait oriented screen brought the performance of BeIA to its proverbial knees is complete hogwash.
Its a simple change of resolution in the Video Card. To a video card 1024×768 is the same as 768×1024. Its transparent to the OS and all applications.
Except in this case. Changing the dimensions of the rectangle isn’t the only factor involved.
Yes, if the eVilla was buggy and slow there is most certainly a more sinister culprit: A fabulous desktop OS hacked up to run in 8 Megs of ROM as a stripped down internet appliance. The fact it was pulled off at all is amazing. The fact that it was buggy and slow had more to do with the compressed filesystem than screen orientation (can you say MS DriveSpace?)
I think the details are slightly different here too. If I remember right, the eVil had 32 MB of RAM, and as far as I know, the compressed filesystem was mainly used to store the OS, email, photos and other attachments, and component apps, not used for regular virtual memory swapping stored with runtime compression/decompression, which is what would have really killed performance. (Since CompactFlash can only be written a limited number of times before failing, using it for VM would reduce the lifespan to virtually useless degress…the eVil had no VM at all from what I know.)
Um…d’oh. Correction…I wrote:
Most displays draw top to bottom, left to right, period
Strike that. Reverse it.
More precisely, screen draws left to right, then drawing those horizontal rows top to bottom.
Duh.
“Nicholas Blachford said: eVilla was slow because Sony put in a tall display and the display had to be rotated before it could be displayed, this crippled the performance of the system, not BeIA. ”
I find this hard to believe as well, but it is possible. If the specs were originally written as landscape & the SW & HW was designed for that (Horizontal scan), then Sony said “Ooops we meant portrait”, it would require such a hack since most video circuits in the tube can’t just flip from H scan to V scan. The old Radius rotatables could switch the H & V scan so SW only did a resize & update.
“Nicholas Blachford said: That said even 400MHz ARMs will likely be slower than the (IIRC) ~150MHz Cyrix CPU eVialla had and thats before power saving considerations are made.”
I find that hard to believe as well, I seem to recall it was an NS Geode not that it makes much difference. I would like to know the source of these statements.
I did see & play with an eVilla in the local MicroCenter Boston. By the time they were pulled, not a single one had been sold over a month, & the sale peoples had no idea what it was. Wasn’t even on the web. Tube was nice though!
Be, Inc. first built the BeBox. The CPU chip they were using, which was popular when they chose it, went out of favor (quickly declining sales) and was dropped.
Thinking it was a good idea, Be switched to the PowerPC CPU during the time that Apple was allowing clones. Then Apple changed its mind and said, “no more clones” and shortly afterwards came the PowerPC 3 CPU with a different ROM chip and programming that Be couldn’t get documentation for.
Then they decided that that they would port BeOS to x86 CPUs. The only problem was that Microsoft’s contracts with major computer makers forbids dual booting with other OSs and demands that Windows be on every computer they sell. So Be couldn’t find a major PC company to (visibly) install BeOS for the US market.
Having struckout three times with the desktop and seeing no other direction to go that way. They turned their attention to the only other place they could see. And that was hand held devices. The problem was, there just wasn’t/isn’t the size of market that Be needed, and they also ran out of cash because no investors felt that Be was going to be able to break into that market either.
With money quickly running out and no place to turn and nobody willing to buy Be for what Be wanted, they filed for bankruptcy and then let Palm buy part of them for $11,000.
As for Apple buying Next instead of Be, Inc., it’s really simple. NextStep was a lot more polished, complete, and mature product. And the CEO (of Next) just happened to know Apple even better than the CEO of Be with a proven track record of getting things done to a lot bigger degree. The choice was clear even at several times the cost of Be.
Next was the way to go at the time and turned out to be the right choice. Steve Jobs just being there gave Apple enough time to survive. His presense in the tech world was and is huge. Even Bill Gates has tremendous respect for him.
Don’t get me wrong about Be. BeOS is one of eight OSs that I have licenses for (notice I didn’t say “own”) and use throughout each week. I like it for what it is and what it would have, could have eventually become. I also have an iMac which is a lot more usable than BeOS out of the box. And that’s with AppleWorks and the other software that came with my iMac. I’ve bought Gobe Productive for Be, Windows, and Linux. But Gobe’s Productive it isn’t up to speed compared to AppleWorks… Even WordPerfect for OS/2 (now more than ten years old) still have day to day handy features that neither of these products have…
Will Palm die? It has a lot more to do with what Microsoft can get away with than what Palm does.
Oops. That should be $10 million not $10 thousand.
> “Nicholas Blachford said: eVilla was slow because Sony put in a tall display and the display had to be rotated before it could be displayed, this crippled the performance of the system, not BeIA. “
>I find this hard to believe as well, but it is possible.
It is 100% true. It is the real reason why eVilla was slow. Read here for more explanation:
http://forums.begroovy.com/showthread.php?threadid=1976
>>”Nicholas Blachford said: That said even 400MHz ARMs
>>will likely be slower than the (IIRC) ~150MHz Cyrix
>>CPU eVialla had and thats before power saving
>>considerations are made.”
>I find that hard to believe as well, I seem to recall it
>was an NS Geode not that it makes much difference. I
>would like to know the source of these statements.
It’s an opinion, not a fact, I shall explain my opinion however:
ARMs are very small simple RISC chips designed for low power embedded use. They don’t have all the bells and whistles of high end server type RISCs (PA-RISC, Alpha etc.) They’re not even superscalar (i.e. can only do one operation per cycle) and barely pipelined. The Xscale is Intels new version of the old StrongARM which was DECs redesign of an ARM.
The Geode is a CISC processor – a real CISC at at that, no RISC core like Athlon / pentium 4 etc. It’s going to do a lot more per cycle than the ARM can manage.
The only benchmarks I can found are for the ARM 1020E which runs at 325MHz and kicks the Geodes arse (and apparently my thory with it…) However this is a much newer version of the Architecture running at 325MHz in 0.13 um and includes things like DSP extensions, Java acceleration etc.
Xscale however is based on a completely different version of the ARM architecture (no Java acceleration). I couldn’t find any benchmarks I could actually compare (Intel quotes 500 Mips at 400MHz)
Thinking it was a good idea, Be switched to the PowerPC CPU during the time that Apple was allowing clones. Then Apple changed its mind and said, “no more clones” and shortly afterwards came the PowerPC 3 CPU with a different ROM chip and programming that Be couldn’t get documentation for.
Amazing how Linux still worked without the documentation on PPC. The only problem Be faced was that it would get the most latest PPC more expensive then what Apple would have paid for. But pre-Jobs (that is when clones were alive), they was still failing in competition with Apple, which was a weak company getting weaker. With the failure of Copland, Be could have quickly gain a lot of Mac-only ISVs to port their apps to their platform. It was a golden opportunity. But did they do that? Nope, they have decided people would buy hardware that is overpriced because of the features, and then ISVs would come out later. And if Gassee manage to make deals with these guys, Motorola and IBM would rather make deals with Be instead of Apple – with Jobs or no Jobs.
Then they decided that that they would port BeOS to x86 CPUs. The only problem was that Microsoft’s contracts with major computer makers forbids dual booting with other OSs and demands that Windows be on every computer they sell. So Be couldn’t find a major PC company to (visibly) install BeOS for the US market.
Actually, the second claim is proven not true. For a very long time, Dell bundled Linux for all their machines as an option. But the bundle came with no Linux. There was lack of consumer demand, and they axed it. They did it because of lack of consumer demand..
But they, and a lot of other major companies, use Linux for their IA32 servers, including IBM, Compaq, HP and so on. The wonder is that their deals with Microsoft never fell through.
And those deals you have mention was legal pre-monopoly days, which is one of the many reasons why the anti trust laws are double standard laws.
>>”Nicholas Blachford said:
>> The only benchmarks I can found are for the ARM 1020E which
>> runs at 325MHz and kicks the Geodes arse (and apparently my
>> thory with it…)
All of which you said is generally true, it is very difficult to compare apples & oranges. I am intimately familiar with Arms & x86 but for similar clock speeds I still couldn’t pick the faster device with out alot more specifics.
Arms are used because of lowcost, lowpower, can be customised & embedded in other chips (for a half mil or so).
In general every computer I use is dog slow more than it should be, even my 1G Athlon can crawl sometimes even with BeOS.
The nature of HW is that it can be evaluated in terms of power, speed, delays, temp sensitivies etc etc. Its all in the specs.
The nature os SW is that it can’t be measured at all, only appreciated by some criteria or another.
Put the SW on HW, & all the HW specs go to bathroom.
I only wish that cpus could again be more predicable in exact cycle counts, & that compilers could predict the execution time of functions not just by executing but by trace analysys with some user input on bounds. That way SW could be measured & specced as well, but that will never happen. Only SW text books can give the O eqns for simple problems.
Let me say that anyone that thinks “Be Inc taking over PalmSource” is a good idea is MAD. Hello, JLG, ran Be Inc into the ground so why let him do it again? This man had the best (yet underdeveloped for) OS in the world. But he just completly forgot about the customers and BeOS. We didn’t want BeIA (well we did, but we wanted BeOS first), and look what do you know the world didn’t want BeIA either. JLG is a fool. BeIA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Not really!
The fact of the matter is that entry to market for BeOS was blocked by Microsoft.
ciao
yc
JLG didn’t run Be Inc to the ground. Microsoft did. Look at all the problems. First you need an OS that kills Windows in every way. You need drivers for all the thousands of devices out there. Then you need to worry about all those people who’ve invested thousands of dollars in Windows software they can’t use within BeOS. Hardware vendors can’t preinstall BeOS on PC’s even for those who don’t mind these things. On top of that you actually have to make money unlike the linux world (though look what happened to Loki Games). Nobody else tried to develop a user friendly OS on PC’s before (or a performance OS on macs). OK maybe you can say he was crazy for trying. But do you want to live in a world where nobody tried to do anything crazy like change the status quo?
Now let’s look at Palm. It has no problem with software or peripherals. It’s popular in retail and the enterprise. Many people even refer to ipaqs as “Palm Pilots.” There are many Palm devices including Sony and Handspring. Palm needs more technology and vision and the Be guys can deliver here. But the uphill battle BeOS faced in the desktop world (or the nonexistent IA world) just doesn’t apply to Palm.
So what if people call ipaqs as “palm pilots” — 99% of the people still refers the photocopy machine as the “xerox machine” — but Xerox is almost close to backruptcy protection and is a second bit player in the photocopy machine for the last 10 years.
Funny how linux is still around even though, Microsoft won’t allow dual boot or whatever. Face it JLG killed it, not only by bad choices but he really killed he only kept alive enough to develop BeIA. Look I love BeOS. But what BeOS fans have to realize is that just because he is (was) the leader doesn’t mean he was right. Don’t be like mac fans with Steve Jobs. (Plus he was French, no way he was going to beat Microsoft, the French don’t even have a word for victory)
> …the French don’t even have a word for victory
NOPE! This is definitely wrong!
The french word for victory is victoire.
Funny how linux is still around even though, Microsoft won’t allow dual boot or whatever.
Different issues, different markets. The fact that Linux is out there certainly doesn’t take Microsoft off its own sharp hook for monopolistic practices.
BeOS was going after the consumer market, using video/audio enthusiasts as the initial “beachhead.” Linux is not, and never has been a factor in the consumer market. Everybody who runs it as their primary desktop operating system (and that’s a small minority, even compared to Mac users) is, for the most part, very technical (or possibly in junior high or high school with tons of time on their hands). They aren’t consumers. Consumers almost invariably run the operating system that was preinstalled on their machines, and if you can’t get your stuff preinstalled, consumers don’t use your stuff.
Moreover, Linux is available at no cost. That Red Hat or Suse or any of the others still try to sell packages in the stores doesn’t make any sense to me, but whatever.
Even free of charge, you don’t (and never did) find machines delivered with both Linux and Windows installed (such that you can easily switch between them at boot). That’s the Microsoft licensing terms at work. Some comment earlier in this thread that Dell was selling multiboot machines was misinformation. (You could order a Linux machine online, but it cost more than a Windows machine, since you were still paying for the copy of Windows Dell wasn’t installing…if that makes any sense.)
BeOS was a commercial operating system which attempted to live or die on paid licenses…not being able to enter the OEM market because of draconian licensing terms from Microsoft, which effectively turn putting another operating system on any of an OEM’s machines into financial suicide, clearly contributed to Be’s demise. In my mind, it’s clearly the most significant factor in Be’s desperate shift to internet appliances, a market that had no established monopolist players.
This whole thing I keep hearing about “Microsoft played no role in Be’s demise” is hard to swallow, particularly when it .
If JLG made any contributing mistakes, his biggest might have been believing that the market for operating systems was a free and open one.
The french victory joke thing was from the simpsons. But the french still suck.
First no one would want to have their OS dual boot with someone elses. I mean if Red Hat was winning in the OS market do you think they would allow a dual boot, NO.
But how come linux could get Dell to sell it on its laptop?
And Be Inc couldn’t?
“JLG made any contributing mistakes, his biggest might have been believing that the market for operating systems was a free and open one.”
Funny how we ALL can see this, but he couldn’t, yeah great CEO.