After earlier announcing plans to create a subsidiary for its operating system, Palm on Thursday said it is looking to divide itself into separate, publicly traded companies. “We are looking to move into external separation next year,” acting CEO Eric Benhamou told CNET News.com on Thursday, shortly after the company announced that Carl Yankowski was resigning as Palm’s chief executive. The company is also looking into asking David Nagel to become the Palm CEO, while he was originally hired to be the CEO of the new Palm subsidiary — the OS division — where the Be engineers and Be’s COO Steve Sakoman would be employeed, after the buyout of Be’s IP would complete. There is a fair amount of uncertainty in the Palm land, as revenue fell a lot recently and the new PocketPC is a rival that the aged PalmOS can’t compete with anymore.
Palm Moving Ahead with Spinoff
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Palm needed a next-generation OS a year ago, not in one or two years from now (that’s how long it takes – assuming that the Be engineers start working on a next-gen Palm OS after the IP buyout is completed). One is wondering if it is already too late for Palm.
I also wonder if this whole Palm situation will be good or bad for BeOS.
Palm’s fucked. Almost as fucked as BeOS is.
BeOS is the next Amiga – the Amiga curse in the 21st century will now be known as the BeOS curse?
😉
i will tell you one thing…
if beos is continued which means that a new release comes out i will go out and buy a NEW version of beos and buy a new palm top…
i dont care about what palm sez i want beos to survive…
because i dont like the way linux is and i want something other then microcrap so this seems like the best alternative
LONG LIVE BEOS
I agree in that BeOS should survive.
But personally I would rather like to see it survive in the shape of OpenBeOS and BlueOS – hopefully with support from Palm. This way we could have the BeOS open, and IMO one of the biggest reasons Be Inc couldn’t manage to get BeOS more popular was that it wasn’t open. And btw – open code never dies!
is the beos going to go anywhere should it be released in its r6 condition? are developers going to think that its worth their time? are we in the midst of a monumental paradigm shift of public desire that an easy to use alt OS is a requisite? is their really any end to the microsoft dominance?
as much as i love the beos i kinda wonder if its really going to make such a big difference to anything outside of its niche market whatever bells and whistles they add. who would use the openGL? games developers? which ones? what is bone going to bring to the table that we don’t have already and how is it going to radically reappraise our fave OS? i dunno, guess i’ve got me cynical hat on today. soz if it looks like trolling or whatever its called, but i’d like to see something other than wishful daydreaming about beos. ok, i’ll leave now before i become the BBQ boy…
BeUnited always seemed to have favorable access to Carl at Palm and has had utterly no response from David Nagel recently, if ever. Now it’s possible that Nagel may become CEO of Palm. The clouds look stormier than ever, but, will it yield a refreshing rainfall or devastating lighting? One can only wonder…
They scale/retool/whatever BeIA or BeOS as a replacement OS in the Handheld market, which is sorely needed. I’ve yet to meet a handheld OS that doesn’t suck. While they’re at it, how about designing a handheld that rates better than annoying (which has only happened once) to go along with their new OS. Hell, we have IBM 1G Micro-Drive now, and RAM is cheap.
None of this prohibits them from doing a BeOS R6, which not only makes my life better, but happens to position Palm to run in just about any environment (short of servers).
expensivelesbian (IP: —.btinternet.com) wrote on 2001-11-09 14:16:14
“is the beos going to go anywhere should it be released in its r6 condition?”
In the very near term, it will let the rest of us take advantage of new apps showing up that require BONE. Some projects that have been put on hold will get finished with a new R6.
In the long term, all of the glitzy new features will take second seat to the staying power of the OS. BeOS will only progress if there is a company or community of programmers backing it up with constant improvements. In other words, if the users and developers don’t see a future for BeOS beyond R6, then it will die. As an example, projects like KDE and GNOME may not have exactly all of the features needed to satisfy a mainstream audience yet, but there are organized efforts to improve each system and so the community stays on.
I used to love BeOS, but I always hated how you couldn’t do what you needed to do with it. You’re in school, and your professor gives out an assignment on the Internet. Inevitably something goes wrong, maybe the site was built w/o multiple browser consideration, or maybe the assignment is in Microsoft Word format, and downloadable.
I loved Be, but the simple fact of the matter is that it couldn’t do what I needed a computer to do. Mostly I think that the comments heretofore concerning the lack of developer support for the OS are well grounded. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just have a ‘Computer’ and on that ‘Computer’ you could select any operaing system, and no matter which one you selected, you would always be able to run the same programs, read the same data, perform the same operations at an API level? Wouldn’t it be cool if write-once run-anywhere *really* worked, without platform idiosynchrocies, and performance problems? In THAT world, BeOS would have taken the market by storm. It is fast, stable, and has a really cool UI. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run the single most important piece of business software in the world today: Microsoft Office. The simple fact is that geeks like new ideas, and are willing to sacrifice the availabilty of X or Y feature on the primary platform because some alternative platform has some really good ideas. The general public is NOT willing to make this sacrifice.
— expecting a rash of shit due to ip —
Take it easy on me, I really do like Be. I was a regisered developer for BeOS back in the day, but I’ve almost given up entirely on the once-revolutionary OS now.
Ugh, what a bunch of self-serving crap coming from a Micro$erf..just kidding 🙂
Actually, you might want to check a couple of articles down regarding PetrOS. Apparently, they are going to work on adding a BeOS compatability layer to it. This way, you could run both Win32 and BeOS apps under the same OS! I would pay US$100 for an OS that could do that. If this is done, I’m hoping that Trumpet goes for a default XFS or BFS filesystem to take advantage of journalling and file attributes.
I suppose that some feel that their arguments will be more convincing using “foul” words. OK get a life losers. The facts are that BeOS is only understood by a few people who have actually studied the BeOS bible. When a techie does understand why BeOS is so very much better than any operation system today then and only then can we find a common arguement. Which is “why did Palm decide to (at this point) stop the use of BeOS and not Open source it?” It doesn’t seem to be too hard to get BeIA working on a palmtop device with the resources that Palm has. Will the apps for BeOS work? Dunno. Could a FreeBeos drive a wooden stake into MS? Don’t care. Palm might just go broke trying to save BeOS. Nothing says that the best should win. The vast majority of people have no idea about computers. They just know that it looks good. This in my opinion was Be Inc.’s worst flaw. They made a GUI look too simple. I hope that Palm does continue to support BeOS and keeps the techinical advantages while making it easy for the computer stupid that buy tech. I’d buy BeOS R6 if it were available. I just like things that work like they should. Good luck to Palm, I am sure that they made a very wise purchase in Be Inc. The people who put together BeOS or BeIA are very talented. I only wish I worked at a place with so forward of thinking. I am sure that I am not talented enough to hang with those dudes. I can’t even get a linux flashpath program to convert to BeOS.
BeOS feels like Apple on a PC. but where’s Apple’s OS now ?, thats right, xBSD unix (MacOS X) on Apples.
mmm? might be the questions of the PalmOS marketing ceo’s.
-don’t get me wrong BeOS is a darling on a well-behaved PC, …umm
but sorry, I don’t “Palm” anything -I don’t even own a Palm device.
I don’t really think BeOS has the same curse as Amiga. It has already reinvented itself several times to survive. BeOS started out as the OS for the BeBox, but realized that the hardware industry wasn’t profitable and started marketing their OS as a Mac alternative. When Apple closed its architecture to outside developers, BeOS made the jump to the Intel architecture. Now it seems that BeOS is making the jump to becoming a handheld OS (although it will probably be called Palm OS instead of BeOS). Although many of us still want our desktop Be, let’s look on the bright side. If Palm manages this right they will have an amazing multimedia palm top OS. As technology advances we’re heading more and more towards portable devices. How long is it until the palmtop replaces the notebook/laptop? With any luck, when that happens we’ll have a BeOS based OS running our palm-tops. And hopefully it will continue into other portable devices like wearable computers and eventually desktop computers.