A large part of what did in BeOS was a combination of Microsoft's OEM licensing requirements and Be's steadfast belief that the only path to success was pre-installation on a major PC brand. IIRC, if you offered Windows pre-installations at all, you had to pay for every machine that Windows could be installed on whether or not it was actually installed, and you couldn't offer machines capable of dual-booting. Be concentrated their efforts on BeIA, an "internet appliance" version of the OS, which was dead in the water -- according to a lawsuit Be filed against Microsoft, MS pressured their OEMs not to partner with Be on both BeOS and BeIA. (Microsoft settled the suit for around $24M, IIRC.)
Personally, I think BeOS might have been able to survive as a niche OS if Be had kept their focus solely on it, kept the price competitive with boxed Linux distributions (those were a thing back then), and not been dedicated to the "go big or go home" mantra, but I don't have any inside info to prove (or disprove) that.
... Except that I don't think there is anything they could have done that would have made them successful, at that point in time, other than possibly not playing hardball when Apple came calling. Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry was just too great.
My contribution to the ecosystem, if in fact I ever made one, was to write what I thought of as the best USENET newsreader available on the platform.
http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/beos/
I definitely would still be using BeOS today, as my day-to-day OS, if that were remotely possible, in this day and age.
They didn't - the decided that hardware is too hard, and JLG lost the momentum - but if they'd made a BeBox that people actually wanted, they would definitely have survived in my opinion. A Laptop-format BeBox, for example, would have had an opportunity to really dominate the field video world, in those days.
But, its all history now.
Beautiful machine. Wonderful operating system. Pity they were so inept commercially. That said, I was also a NeXT user, and I’m convinced that Apple wouldn’t have returned to the forefront if they had chosen “Plan Be” instead of the Steve Jobs option.
Not quite. While the file system resided on the Windows or Linux partition as a drive image, to run BeOS you rebooted the computer into BeOS natively; the boot loader booted that drive image from the other OS's file system.
In fact, once in the BeOS environment, you could use the BeOS disk manager and installer to create a BeOS native partition on free space on the main drive or a second drive, and install the OS natively to the PC. Effectively, you could run the full OS on its own for free.
That's exactly what I did for the first few months I used BeOS back in 2000; I was so taken with the OS I bought the full version and tracked down a hard copy of the BeOS Bible and Be Advanced Topics, both of which are still on my bookshelf.
> "I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had."
There were no licensing restrictions that I was aware of, however it wouldn't run on machines with more than 768MB without a patch.
BeOS was quite interesting too. Though it lacked multi-user support, and had a small user community. Its BeFS filesytem had an indexing feature that dwarfs all desktop search features even today - and Windows "Cairo" (1996) / WinFS (2006) that tried to accomplish it too, turned out as vamporeware.
Both NeXTSTEP and BeOS were ahead with multimedia support like real time video player and WYSIWYG editor.
I must say I was hugely disappointed when Apple chose not to pursue “Plan Be” and opted to purchase NeXT instead. The operating system seemed like overkill and not a good match for Apple’s use-case (single-user machines, media-focussed workflows, with an obvious advantage to be drawn from pre-emptive multitasking and almost real-time multimedia processing). NeXTStep struck me as a much more “workstation-type” OS that would have had little resonance on the consumer and professional market.
It turned out I was wrong: Moore’s Law has made the heavyweight NeXTStep an eminently shoulderable burden, and that it is now so “lightweight” in relative standards that its direct descendant (iOS) can comfortably run on (albeit unimaginably powerful) mobile devices.
I wrote elsewhere in this thread that with the benefit of hindsight I don’t think Apple’s resurgence could have happened had they had chosen Plan Be.
Be failed because it existed in the times of Microsoft dominance, Apple didn't buy it, and it had some major technical deficiencies (many of which have been addressed in Haiku).
R5 PE had that partition size because it installed to a 512MB file within your Windows partition, then booted from that file. Personal Edition was meant to give a way to try BeOS without having to have a second drive or do any partitioning. Once booted into it, you could just launch the Installer app and install to any size partition you pleased.
Be was essentially dead decently before R5 was released, so I disagree with the author's conclusion.