Jean-Louis Gassee went all megalomaniac
November 4, 2006I still wonder at how many people seem to think that Microsoft killed Be, Inc. and the BeOS, while in fact, Microsoft only played a small part in it.
BeOS did not die because of Microsoft alone. BeOS dies for the first time when they bet on AT&T’s hobbit processor which got canceled. BeOS dies for the second time when Apple blocked it from running on Apple machines by not releasing specs (Apple knew BeOS was better than MacOS 8/9). It dies a third time when Microsoft saw it as a threat. Finally, BeOS dies for the fourth time when Jean-Louis Gassee went all megalomaniac (JLG thought Be was worth much more than the money Apple wanted to pay for it, and hence, turned down the offer).
So basically, BeOS’s killers are Be, Inc. itself, Apple, Microsoft, and JLG.
BeOS | 
Microsoft never saw BeOS as a threat.
What killed BeOS was that Be was a company full of technologists without a viable business plan.
Comment by arve — November 5, 2006 @ 7:04 am
Microsoft exercised its monopoly to keep BeOS off supposedly open x86. I’m wondering how much they paid you after the fact to get you to establish a record that such a thing didn’t happen. Insurance is always a good idea.
Comment by SlapsYouAroundWithFish — July 26, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
The fifth time, BeOS dies when Palm/PalmSource fail to deliver their flaghship vaporware, Palm OS6, aka Cobalt.
Comment by Kun Xi — May 23, 2008 @ 10:38 pm
Lack of specs didn’t stop LinuxPPC from reverse engineering the hardware. BeOS could have done the same, but instead chose to focus their efforts on x86 of PowerPC. Complaining about documentation was just their way to blame their crappy PPC support on Apple while completing their transition to x86.
Comment by Anonymous — June 17, 2008 @ 11:01 am