Why BeOS fails in the corporate environment By Lexx Core in Lexx Core's Diary Fri Sep 23, 2011 at 08:57:03 PM EST Tags: BeOS, Be Inc, oggfrog, haha, epic fail, corporate, environment (all tags)
	BeOS was a nice OS, but why did it fail in the corporate environment? I will write and tell you why. Most don't understand these things so this will be a series of diaries on the subject when I find the free time to write more.

BeOS was a nice try at attempting to rip off the best Amiga features and put them on a BeBox or Mac or later Intel PC after Apple screwed Be Inc but not releasing specs for PowerMacs and G3 and up PowerPC processors to port BeOS to those platforms. Later Apple wanted to buy Be Inc for BeOS but bought out Next and Steve Jobs instead to get the BSD Unix based NextOS as Mac OS X later. I know something about failure, so I'll tell you. Uh yeah this reads a bit like the Why OS/2 failed in the corporate environment diary because most failed OSes lacked the same features and suffered the same failures. But modern operating systems should learn from them to get better. #1 Limited to what systems it could run on. Due to Apple screwing Be Inc the BeOS was limited to what platforms it could run on. The BeBox and Geekport was nice but too expensive and hardware was not profitable so BeOS was ported to the PowerMac platform until Apple refused to give Be Inc the specs to newer Macs and PowerPC chips. So Be Inc did a Next and ported BeOS to Intel PCs, and both suffered the same fate as Intel PC owners did not want their OS but Windows instead or maybe Linux. Yeah Linux helped kill BeOS as it was more open and portable to other systems. Apple helped kill BeOS as well by refusing to give it the technical details it needs for porting to PowerMacs. Even the Amiga had a larger marketshare and Commodore went bankrupt and sold Amiga to many different companies. I think Palm bought out BeOS and sold it to some other company and then HP bought out Palm and made PalmOS as WebOS and then dumped the WebOS tablets for $99 on the market. #2 Lack of server software. Uh really, what server software? Not much. BeOS was designed for multimedia and not business servers. A mistake that HakuOS should fix by porting SAMBA and other things to HakuOS so it is useful for business as BeOS is dead now without new updates. If BeOS had server software and a server edition it would have Be Inc still in business with a nice market of a BeOS blade server array that costs less than Windows Server, Linux, or Mac OS X servers because of the lower overhead of the BeOS operating system. #3 Lack of development software. Give me a break you have C/C++ compilers, lucky to have Python or Java, and maybe Free Pascal. Ask really nice and MDC will give you Zoolib support for gcc C++ compilers so OggFrog will work on BeOS. Where is the Visual BASIC, the Borland compilers? A true corporate enterprise wants enterprise and commercial compiler languages and not the open sores ones.  #4 Lack of network support protocols or hard to configure. You are lucky to have TCP/IP but IP6 support is a kludge and might not work. No protocols for Novell Netware, AppleTalk, NFS, SAMBA or anything else. If you want to share files on your network set up an FTP server and use a FTP client to share files with BeOS. #5 Lack of modern business applications. Hahahahahaha what business applications? Be Inc dropped the ball here. At least MDC and company did Spellswell so that other programs could have a spell checker as many word processors for BeOS lacked it. Even Apple suffered when the Macintosh was marketed towards the creative content market and not the business market. I remember back in 1985 the college computer club I was in having a debate with the Mac guy (Who owned a Lisa and called it a Macintosh XL) that Macs aren't business machines. He got mad and said "them's fighting words!" and I asked him to name at least twelve business applications for the Mac. He did Excel, MacCharlie, MacPaint, MacBASIC, uh uh, well more on the way. BeOS was that way as well multimedia and creative content. At least with Mac OS X Apple got more business savvy and added in stuff like server software and got a few business apps ported to it. #6 No 64 bit mode to take advantage of 64 bit hardware. Windows and Linux went 64 bit, BeOS never did. If it had BeOS would run like a rocket next to Windows and Linux. Spellswell in 64 bit would be awesome but it did not happen so corporations rejected it. #7 Not scaleable and not portable to other platforms. I think BeOS had multi processor support not sure about dual core or hyperthreading. But it does not do ARM or Alpha or SPARC, but it did do PowerPC and Intel X86 systems at Pentium 4 and below. Maybe BeOS can be run via an emulator like BOCHS to run on the other platforms? But it will run dog slow. Even AmigaDOS/AmigaOS runs fast in UAE emulation in other systems as a Motorola 68K OS. I had hoped VirtualBOX could run it but it didn't. Well at least there is the BeBits Intel BeOS archive out there, MDC was the best developer and supporter of BeOS and OggFrog should be ported to it by 2017 - 2021 some day. Then it will have one more reason to use it should HakuOS not get finished.

Poll

Best use of BeOS Amiga emulator 100% MAME emulator 100% Paint program 0% Multimedia OS 100% Spellswell host 100% Oggfrog testing 100% Runs on 601 PowerMacs 100% Runs on old crappy WINTEL boxes 100% FTP server 0% Running old BeOS programs when too lazy to download HakuOS 100% BBS software 100% An OS that viruses cannot infect because BeOS has no active viruses out there 100% ATM software 0% WIPO 0% Votes: 1 Results | Other Polls

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