Be Inc.

» see be.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The company was nearly called United Technoids Inc. That was Jean-Louis Gassée's suggestion, and Steve Sakoman said he would look for something better in the dictionary. He got tired somewhere in the B section and reported back, and Gassée said that Be was nice and that was the end of the naming discussion. The slogan they printed under it was that one processor per person is not enough.

Gassée had run product development at Apple and had been pushed out by John Sculley in 1990. He started Be that year with Sakoman, money from Seymour Cray among others, and a growing number of former Apple engineers including Erich Ringewald, who had led the Pink operating system team and became Be's CTO. They worked with the doors shut for more than four years before showing anyone what they had built.

What came out was the BeBox in October 1995 and BeOS with it, and the eleven-year story from there is a sequence of platforms that kept dissolving underneath the company. Its own hardware lasted until early 1997, and the Macintosh clone makers who picked up BeOS after that lasted until Apple closed the clone program down. The Apple acquisition that would have made the whole thing make sense went to NeXT in December 1996. Intel bought ten percent of Be in 1998 and BeOS moved to x86, which put the software one signature away from a real market and left it there.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the hobbit problem ~

The first Be machine was not a PowerPC box. The prototype grew into a design built around five AT&T Hobbit processors, a chip derived from work at Bell Labs and aimed at handheld devices, and by 1992 Be had a kernel and an interface running on it. The operating system that later got demonstrated at trade shows as impossibly fast was written for that hardware first.

Then AT&T left the processor business. Hobbit sold badly, the part was discontinued around 1994 with Be's own product close to finished, and four years of work had to be lifted onto PowerPC before anybody outside the building had seen it. Apple's Newton team had started on the same chip and got off it early enough to ship on ARM instead. Be stayed, and lost four years to a processor its own vendor had decided not to keep making.

~ the appliance years ~

By February 2000 Be had stopped arguing about desktops. BeIA was announced as an operating system for internet appliances, and BeOS 5 Personal Edition was put out as a free 48 MB download for anyone who wanted it, which is what a company does when it has concluded the product will never be sold. The Nasdaq listing from July 1999 was already sliding on a major OEM deal that had been talked about and never appeared.

Sony took BeIA for the eVilla, a browser-and-email terminal shown at CES in January 2001 and sold from 14 June at 499 dollars. Sony announced on 30 August that it was discontinuing the product, pulled stock back from retailers by 13 September and refunded every buyer including the subscription fee. So Be sold itself two weeks before its last shipping product was recalled off the shelves, and the two events were the same event seen from different ends.

~ the settlement ~

Palm announced on 16 August 2001 that it would take the assets for about eleven million dollars. Shareholders approved on 13 November and the company entered dissolution the same day, with Gassée joining Palm's board. Palm had no interest in a desktop operating system and moved the Be assets into PalmSource, which was later bought by ACCESS in Japan, so the code ended up two owners further along from anybody who had wanted it.

The corpse then sued. In February 2002 Be filed against Microsoft, arguing that the OEM license terms had stopped machine makers from offering dual-boot systems and that Compaq had been leaned on to drop an appliance partnership. The complaint also said the flotation had been held down by it. The case settled out of court in September 2003 for 23.25 million dollars, roughly twice what Palm had paid for everything the company owned. Stac had collected 120 million from Microsoft in 1994 and Caldera an estimated 280 million in 2000, and Be is the third name on that short list, collecting after it no longer existed.

The complaint only works in a market where consumers buy machines from manufacturers. Turkish desktops in those years mostly came out of a shop on a street full of other shops, assembled to order from a box of parts, and whoever put it together would install whatever you asked them to install. There was no OEM agreement anywhere near that transaction. The one market condition that killed Be did not exist here, and it made no difference at all, because there was no revenue in this country either way.

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