Gobe Software

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

~ the eulogy ~

BeOS was an operating system i read about rather than one i ran. In 1999 the machine at home was windows, my time online was billed by the minute, and that is not a state of mind in which you go looking for a second operating system to download and install. Gobe existed to make that second operating system worth the trouble, which means i am on the wrong side of the exact question the company was built to answer.

Gobe Software was founded in 1997 in Portland, Oregon by people who had written ClarisWorks, some of whom went back further than that to StyleWare on the Apple II. They had built the integrated suite that shipped in the box with a great many Macs, watched Apple fold Claris back into itself, and then went and did the same work again on a platform that had nothing. Gobe Productive 1.0 shipped in august 1998 and version 2.0 a year after that, with 2.0.1 landing on 29 february 2000.

The product was one application, not a bundle. A Gobe document could hold word-processed text with a live spreadsheet frame sitting inside it, and vector drawing was the same document type again rather than a separate program. That was the ClarisWorks idea carried forward, and on BeOS it ran fast enough to embarrass software costing five times as much on Windows. For a couple of years it was the answer to the question every BeOS skeptic asked, which was whether you could actually get anything done on it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

In 2000 Be Inc. stopped publishing BeOS itself and handed distribution to outside companies. Gobe took North America along with Australia and a slice of Asia, so a small office in Oregon was suddenly the company you bought an operating system from. Weeks after the publishers signed, Be announced that its corporate focus was moving to internet appliances, which told every developer and every customer that the desktop was over.

Gobe could not repair that even in principle. The publishers were never given source access, so when BeOS needed drivers for hardware that shipped after Be stopped caring, nobody in the distribution chain could write them. The company ported Productive to Windows and shipped version 3 in december 2001, and started a Linux build. Neither one arrived into a market that was waiting, and after the 2000 crash there was no capital left to wait with.

~ the day it died ~

In august 2002 OSNews ran an exclusive saying Gobe Productive was going to be released under the GPL. A new company called FreeRadical Software, started by Gobe's own Bruce Hammond, had agreed terms to buy the source and open it. Tom Hoke, one of the founders, gave a line to that piece that reads worse every year: his worst fear was that all the effort would go completely to waste, and at least this way the work would live on.

It went to waste. In december the same site reported that FreeRadical had not raised the money to license the code and was a nonstarter. The detail in that report is the obituary. Gobe's phones were already disconnected and new orders were no longer being accepted, and the web server was answering only because the ISP had not gotten around to switching it off. Nothing was ever GPL'd. A Windows build numbered 3.0.4 appeared in july 2003 and that was the last release of anything with the name on it.

~ the long tail ~

The name kept twitching for years. In january 2008 Hammond told OSNews that Gobe Software had reacquired the software and was exploring paths to further development. There was an unshipped Linux version sitting there, he said, and a port to KDE might lead somewhere after that. In august 2010 the website went dark and the domain was sold. None of it produced a release.

What is left is a small population of BeOS people who still call Gobe Productive the best application ever written for that system, and a copy of version 2.01 sitting on the Internet Archive for anyone who wants to check. The suite outlived the operating system it was written for, which is a strange sentence to have to write about office software. It was never the software that failed here.

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