[sutro]

Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared the way for Jobs's second coming at Apple. How different the tech world would be today if Gassée had said yes to Apple's initial acquisition offer. I wonder how often he thinks about the breakdown of that deal, lo these many years later.

[allenbrunson]

There were definitely some egos involved. According to some accounts I've read, Gassee was forced out of Apple due to disagreements with Sculley. I worked at Be and spoke with Gassee, so I know he's kind of, um, "volatile," let's say. He probably felt ill-treated at Apple and this was his chance to right a previous wrong.

BUT. I used and developed for BeOS for many years. And now I've used and developed for MacOSX for many years. And I think Apple made the right decision, both technically and politically.

At the time, NextStep was far more mature. Next was a lot better funded than Be was. And Apple's original DNA was formed in Jobs' image, so he was far better prepared to run the place.

[dcurtis]

If Apple bought Be, it wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs.

It is possible that Apple would have died, and Be would have suffered the same fate either way.

[sutro]

That is possible. It is also possible that Apple would have thrived in different ways. There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone. Jobs would likely not be the legend that he is today, though of course he would still be in the history books. What is certain, though, is that Be, as both a business and a technology, and Gassée as an individual, are exponentially less successful now (by standard business metrics, not necessarily in a deeper sense) than they would have been had Gassée said yes. I wonder if that still haunts him, or if he has made peace with it.

[pavlov]

There wouldn't have been an iPhone, but the Newton would most likely have become a smartphone platform.

(Actually a hypothetical 2002 NewtonPhone might have been quite the killer product against the first iterations of Symbian, Windows Mobile and PalmOS on Treos...)

[tfh]

  > There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone.

Why there would be no iPod? AFAIK it's not Steve Jobs who came with the idea.

[sutro]

No, Jobs didn't invent digital audio players, nor did anyone else at Apple. But Jobs decided to pursue it as a business. The story -- apocryphal or no -- is that Jobs named Apple Computer after the Beatles' label, Apple Records. He has always been a music fanatic. It is unlikely that with anyone else at the helm Apple would have driven as hard or as far into the music business.

[JulianMorrison]

IIRC, Be was not technically superior. It was a one-user no-security pre-internet OS which had been highly polished in for one task: concurrent multimedia. It would have require a lot of work to bring up to scratch as a graphical design platform to rival NeXT (which was always about ultra-precision, and even used PostScript to draw its GUI).

[gecko]

This is very true. I like to think that, in a lot of ways, Be was what Mac OS 8 (the original Mac OS 8) should have been: a massive, massive improvement on the design of System 7, while retaining the general feel of the operating system. NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were always more about being a vast improvement on Unix. Yes, Be had some POSIX emulation, but there's a huge difference between that, and actually integrating properly with a complex multiuser Unix network with shared directories, site-wide logins, and so on--something that NEXTSTEP had had time to hone to perfection due to its heavy use in academia and government.

BeOS is still interesting to me, but mostly in a historical sense. I have to agree that purchasing NeXT was a vastly wiser decision.

EDIT: As a quick addendum to my post: although this has changed in the intervening years, the one thing that Be definitely did have going for it back then was that its kernel was technically superior, delivering mostly the same benefits of a true microkernel design, but with vastly superior performance to Mach. I have no idea what the current state of things would be on that front; between Apple merging BSD into the kernel space and replacing DriverKit (Objective-C) with IOKit (eC++), the differences are probably minimal.

[wmf]

BeOS delivered no benefits of microkernel design; in fact its userspace network stack was clearly worse than competing kernel network stacks.

[cubicle67]

I don't think technical superiority is as clear cut as that. From memory BeOS was better in some areas, and NeXT in others. I'll go find out which was better where and why.

[garnet7]

I think things would've been very different if Be Inc. had just kept being a desktop OS company. They didn't need Apple to succeed -- they could've just accepted that uptake of the OS would be slow, and just kept at it.

Guess that wasn't good enough for management though. They had to go out in a blaze of "Internet Appliance" glory.