If you were to believe some, BeOS is a dead Operating System. If this was the case you would expect numbers at BeGeistert to be dwindling, but the reality is different, the corpse is moving and this was the biggest BeGeistert yet.
BeGeistert 010 was as ever held in Dusseldorf Germany 26-27th April 2003.
All the BeGeisterts (BeGeisterten?) I’ve been to (004 onwards) have been at a Church hall where we had rooms to sleep in, a big room in which to set up computers and a few smaller rooms.
The church hall is apparently no longer available so the orga team managed to find us a new location in a Youth Hostel, this is a lot larger, situated much closer to the centre of Dusseldorf and a great deal easier to find – everyone still managed to get lost but this time it was easier to get found again.
The larger location means more can sleep over if they need to and indeed with the higher number of people there they wouldn’t have been able to accommodate us in the old place. I believe something in the order of 50 people stayed over Saturday night which is very good considering there were only 25 present this time last year.
As with 009 I was accompanied by two of my colleagues and we also gave a lift to Francois Revol (aka mmu_man) who was also traveling from France, France? Yes, I live in Paris now :-D. It’s a long journey by car (around 5 hours) and as is the usual custom I arrived too late for the group dinner but Charlie showed us to a restaurant where we enjoyed a nice meal and I discovered Germans describe meat cooked “rare” as “English”, this is really weird as the English way of cooking meat is anything but rare!
Friday evening a small-ish room had been taken up by those present with many of the usual faces present, as ever I had my camera and they knew I’d turned up simply because of the camera flash! There was nothing official on the Friday night as is usually the case, just meeting up with people and catching up with what’s been going on. The usual suspects were there as usual and I had various chats with various people on a various subjects and heard some nice juicy rumours in the process. For some reason we got kicked out of the room and ordered to bed at the strangely early hour of 3.00AM, this is unusually early for a Friday night at BeGeistert.
What was worse however is that we had to get up early – breakfast finished at 8:30 and that’s just not good for your alertness if you went to bed at 3AM! However a cunning plan had been hatched to keep some breakfast over for the stragglers who get up late (like me) so I managed to get some food, though even I managed to get up before 9.
On Saturday we’d moved into a much larger room where everyone set their computers up. The room is bigger than the main room at the old location and tables and chairs were set up around 3 sides and a row in the middle giving more space for people to set up their systems. It wasn’t all taken up in the morning but by the end of the day the room was completely full and I think they even had to move in some extra tables and chairs at one point. When I counted there were 21 laptops and 9 desktop computers.
People do all sorts of things at BeGeistert, some were coding, some looking at what had been coded and fixing problems with other people, quite a few were BeSharing and at least one guy insisted on doing a *cough* Backup. With a system currently not commercially supported (The BeOS reincarnation Zeta has not been released yet) it becomes a problem to support newer hardware and so a few people get together at BeGeistert and work on Drivers.
The mix of people this time was very international, Germans make up the biggest group of course but there were also people from The Netherlands, France, USA, Estonia, Sweden, Croatia, Italy, Portugal, Moldavia and the UK.
My colleagues and I brought along a Pegasos / MorphOS system as we did at BeGeistert 009, that time we (well, they) did a demo of the system but since most people present had seen that we didn’t bother with a formal demo this time. With our demo machines currently doing a world tour of different customs offices we brought along one of the guys systems so anyone who wanted to could have a look, and indeed quite a few did.
For the second time at BeGeistert we found ourselves getting interviewed by an Amiga magazine! The Italian print magazine Bitmap magazine covers different systems including of course MorphOS and being at BeGeistert of course also BeOS. It was a pretty strange interview as I think it was just thought up on the spot and it consisted of a few questions written down as they thought of them, I just hope they can read (or more accurately, de-cipher) my handwriting. Apparently they can read my writings on-line as one of them had translated my BeGeistert 008 review!
As usual there were a few demonstrations:
The prolific Stephan Assmus always seems to end up doing a demo and this time he didn’t fail us. Indeed this time he had an entirely new program to show off. Wonderbrush is a deceptively simple yet surprisingly powerful drawing app which Stephan wrote because there was nothing that supported his drawing tablet properly. Wonderbrush is a sort of Photoshop in miniature and supports some of the same features including history and layers but of course there has been more thrown in so it can do things that Photoshop can’t do like reorder and change the history. The app is still being worked on and no doubt it’ll turn up on Bebits sometime and I’m sure quite a few will find it useful.
Chris Simmons showed a collection of the movies he took at the recent CBit show.
As part of this he decided to set himself a quest: The get people to say “Hello BeOS community”. So you had clips of all sorts of different people saying hello including some from Palm whose staff mostly hadn’t even heard of BeOS (if you don’t know, they won it) and the ultimate coup – a Microsoft guy!
At BeGeistert 009 there had been a OpenBeOS get together and they did a short talk but didn’t show anything, but it was interesting for the progress report and the details the web page doesn’t show i.e a great deal of work had to be done on a library and this is not on the website.
This time Axel Dorfler and Marcus Overhagen did a demo of OpenBeOS running, admittedly it isn’t the most exciting thing in the world to look at at right now but they showed a short demo program (written in front of us using the BeAPI) which was then compiled and run. The program wasn’t exactly exciting to look at either but the fact that an app using threads written using the BeAPI does show that work has been done and progress is being made. A lot of the current (and previous) work is on the foundations which may not look very exciting but you can’t see anything without them.
Marcus was meant to show the Media kit working but alas it wasn’t competed in time for the demo. He did manage to get it working later and displayed a video and the nodes it went through. OBOS is based on parts and much work has been done on them, however there is more to do and again much of this depends on certain key parts of the system. In this case the Kernel requires work before some other parts can progress further so some work is being concentrated there.
A funny point in the Q&A session was when Bearnd of YellowTab asked about prioritisation of different parts – he asked what they were waiting for and Marcus gave the rather surprising answer that they were waiting for Zeta! Zeta will get more interest in BeOS and OBOS will pick up from that.
After the OpenBeOS demonstration I got the chance to do my short announcement. I’ve never done an announcement in front of 50-ish people complete with umpteen cameras flashing so I was a little nervous. It’s public knowledge now of course but I was very happy to announce that Ex-Be inc. developer Travis Geistelbrecht had a Pegasos to port NewOS and OpenBeOS developer Axel Dorfler also had one with the aim of porting OpenBeOS.
BeOS of course started it’s public life on PowerPC so this’ll bring it back again.
Being interested and working in the alternative computer field I am well aware of the almost religious fever Operating Systems have around them – we offer our own OS MorphOS and of course we want people to use it but people will want what they want to use – so we’ll do all we can to help them.
After the demos were over the Alt (dark Dusseldorf beer) and was flowing for quite a while but we eventually got hungry and went for some food. Weirdly my colleagues decided to go for a MacDonalds, being from France of all places you’d expect them to go elsewhere but maybe they’d had enough of good food… Some of us decided to go into the old town which in the new location isn’t so far away. Charlie navigated us along the “world’s longest bar” to a *really* good pizzeria where we enjoyed a good feed, must have been good because we had two of the Italians with us and they approved. During the meal we found out that one of our number Sergei Dolgov (Stripzilla and Firebird developer, hero of BONE users everywhere) had his Birthday that very day so a sweet was procured, photos taken and we all sung happy birthday.
After the pizza and a short walk we went to outside a small bar where they sell a strange drink called Killepitsch, a strong but very sweet drink which was sort of like a stronger version of the “glu wine” (warm sweet wine) you get at the German Christmas markets. While we were enjoying this small but very potent drink we bumped into a crowd of Garman girls engaged in a German pre-wedding ceremony where you pay a Euro and get a kiss from the bride to be, they also take your photo and you write in a little book beside it. I don’t always understand these strange central European traditions – in Britain we go out, get very drunk, tie the victim to a lamppost naked and cover him with flour.
Next day we had the much anticipated talk from YellowTab, they didn’t need to introduce it to the attendant crowd of course as we all know about Zeta and besides of which they’d introduced it at BeGeistert 009. They were very evasive about what exactly Zeta was at 009 but that cat is long since out of the bag and gone off chasing mice, they acknowledge the origin of their code – Zeta uses the BeOS sources (or at least some of them).
Zeta is looking pretty good now and a lot of work is being done. Some seem to think this is a bug fixed version of “Dano” (a late leaked version of BeOS) but there it’s more than that with internationalisation being added, themes, transparent clocks and who knows what else. I’m not quite sure but I think the OpenBeOS BFS is also being used.
YellowTab have been busy with Bernd flying left right and centre, he says there is quite considerable interest in the product with enquiries coming from resellers all over the world.
Their new investors turned up in a car complete with a huge YellowTab logo and had a load of stickers and posters to give out although if I may be so brave I’d like to suggest that for YellowTab an investment in an English spell checker might be a prudent move…
Sunday ended fairly early for us as Francois had to get a train and we had to get to Paris in time for this so we had to leave pretty early. However some others stayed on and indeed you could stay a third night if you wanted to this time. Only a few did stay the extra night but I’m sure it must have been interesting.
One thing I like about the Be community is that although there are different directions being taken for the most part they are one community and many work across the different projects. This is rather different from the Amiga community which these days suffers from at least a vocal minority who are badly split and spew venom at one another. The once great Amiga community is but a shadow of it’s former self and could learn a lesson from communities like BeOS (and also the BSDs) where different directions even if competitive are still seen as beneficial to the whole.
I think BeGeistert 010 ended on a high note, the community, although small is still very much alive and active and new developments are on the way. Blue Eyed OS barely got a mention but it’s shown a demo, OBOS is progressing, Zeta looks good and isn’t too far off, even the PowerPC folks will have something to be happy about. Since the show the BeAPI has turned up on both Windows and BSD – if you can’t beat them, infect them! This is a completely different story from a couple of years ago which was full of uncertainty, doom and gloom.
Postscript:
This review was very nearly never written, that evening I was assaulted – and nearly killed – by a chicken curry:
I started eating it but after a couple of mouthfuls some got lodged in my throat preventing me from swallowing, this severely constricted my windpipe making breathing difficult (I had to hold my head right back and force the air through). What’s really scary is that your body automatically tries to clear it by trying to swallow ever so often but this takes a few seconds during which you can’t breathe at all. I tried clearing it with water but that didn’t help and I was about to go out and knock on a neighbors door when suddenly it cleared itself. This lasted a couple of minutes and needless to say scared 3 shades of s**t out of me…
Such an experience makes you wonder what’s really important and how it can all be ended by something so simple. Life is precious, enjoy it.
Thanks yet again for the nice report Nicholas. 🙂
> This is rather different from the Amiga community which
> these days suffers from at least a vocal minority who
> are badly split and spew venom at one another. The once
> great Amiga community is but a shadow of it’s former
> self and could learn a lesson from communities like BeOS
> (and also the BSDs) where different directions even if
> competitive are still seen as beneficial to the whole.
Sadly I have to agree on this. I find it very strange that certain vocal people seem to think that the delays or tough luck/financial weather which most smaller IT firms and also some Amiga firms had to go through were intentional. There seems to be an unhealthy degree of Schadenfreude (Taking joy of other people’s misery and misfortune) within a vocal minority of the (ex-)Amiga community, even with rival executives taking the lead!
No commercial company delays potential incomes intentionally and in the case of Amiga companies there are 100’s of hard working people trying to get things done, but the involved companies will not rush things to release a product with which they and therefor likely its potential userbase would not be satisfied with. AmigaOS has been neglected for many years before the current team started to undertake this enormous project to make AmigaOS a commercially competitive product again.
In reality there’s alot to be happy about with regarding the current Amiga market. The current situation is alot more healthy than a couple of years ago when the development of new solutions (especially with regard to reviving AmigaOS) seemed hopeless. Now we even have various rival solutions receiving steroid injections. It’s not all Doom and Gloom, even far from that. And very soon we will be able to taste the fruits resulting from thid long, tedious and sometimes merciless road the Amiga community had to go trough to reach this point. 🙂
It’s very nice to hear about development, both communitywise as softwarewise.
Obviously, OBOS has some more months before it’s gonna be anything cool to look at, but they work really hard.
However, Yellowtab is indeed valuable in terms of marketing BeOS, unfortunately doing the same mistake as Amigaland. They’re not releasing anything!!!
I would actually believe that OBOS R1 will be public earlier than Zeta R1
I agree. Making your product look like vaporware is not the best way to sell.They have those “Zeta will be out before you know it” announcements every month…and lie. If it’s so close to readiness, why not release NOW? It would be lots of money.
Als: from the screenshots, it looks like BeOS is going back to R5 blocky tabs….too bad.
> [YellowTAB] They’re not releasing anything!!!
Maybe it is because it is not ready yet?
it is called BeGeisterer
“Geist” is the german word for ghost.
“Geister” is the german word for ghosts.
“geistern” is the german verb for ??? don’t know how to translate that. but it is what a ghost is normaly doing (going around, beeing bad at people, etc)
“Geistert” is the german word for something that is ghosting around.
“Geisterer” is the german word for one or multiple ghost or objects doing “geistern”.
i hope this is somehow understundable….
cheers
SteveB
Well, all right. It isn’t ready. But then why all the “just wait one more week” status updates? They had them back in December too if I remember correctly. It has the net effect of making the audience frustrated and cynical.
The Be community is still fairly small these days, and lots of folks are familiar with other folk’s names but have never seen their faces. It’s always neat to have a face to place with a name.
Thanks for the pics. In the future, please consider putting names (rather than the somewhat silly quips) below the photos. Something like “left to right: Foo Johnson, Bar Biggsley,..” It’s perfectly acceptable if you don’t know everyone’s name — you can’t know everyone.
Again, thanks. It’s neat to see all that geek Be energy concentrated in such a small space.
Begeistert? geee.. this means beeing inspired or to like something…
so the plural of BeGeistert would be BeGeisterte.
German: Ich bin begeistert.
English: I am inspired.
German: Alle begeisterten Menschen.
English: All inspired humans.
sorry… has nothing to do with ghosts
cheers
SteveB
I already wanted to write how, uhm, curious it feels as a German to see some German words used in these contexts, but these comments here make it even more hilarious (no insult intended =).
“begeistert” is an adjective meaning “enthusiastic”, “avid”, “thrilled”.
(It’s indeed a word using the word “Geist”, “ghost”. I think the historic comes from “von Geistern besessen”, “possesed by ghosts” describing a high degree of happiness which then led to the verb “begeistern”, “to enthuse”, but I may be wrong.)
It’s called “Begeistret” in Norwegian 🙂
Hmmmm… Muss wohl neben meinem eigenen Geist gestanden haben, als ich dies geschrieben habe
Gruss
SteveB
I think beeing “possesed by ghosts” is not a high degree of happiness. At least at the time when they probably created the word “Begeistert”, I think a ghost was something mystic and had not a meaning of something good (except “der Heilige Geist”).
cheers
SteveB
so when is yellowtab going to be available? Any insights? Any business partners or oems (PC or otherwise) that might use it? It sounded like they had some interest in the past.
> so when is yellowtab going to be available? Any insights? Any business partners or oems (PC or otherwise) that might use it? It sounded like they had some interest in the past.
If I tell you I have to kill you
“If I tell you I have to kill you
”
how about a broad range like summer, fall, or winter 2003.
how about a broad range like summer, fall, or winter 2003.
if he tells you a year after 2003, then probably he wont be able to kill you, because the community will kill him
It’s pretty hilarious to hear that it’s not done yet.
Why would someone be so stupid that they market something by going out to all exhibitions and stuff only to answer people who ask “When and where can I buy” with the answer “I don’t have a clue”….
Zeta is vaporware at worst or R5+some patches for all I am concerned until I see “we take orders now” on our new operating system.
But as everyone already know… YT isn’t a serious company, if they were, they’d release something…
Correction….Exp/Dano+some patches.
They have looncraz of PhosphurOS fame working for them though, so it’s probably gonna be good. (PhOS was great)
A bunch of people are using the beta (internal developers, duh). I talked to some on BeShare. It’s pretty much fully functional. I think it’s probably some redistribution issue.
in both the be and amiga camps (as well as any other where its come up) would be solved by simply not implying that something is “almost ready” when its still going to be awhile
a good philosophy would be “predict long and far and give the public a happy surprise when you deliver ~early~”
the sooner the public is told something is coming the sooner they expect to have it
They have looncraz of PhosphurOS fame working for them though, so it’s probably gonna be good
You mean the looncraz who publicly said here that if it didn’t ship by April, he’d leave the project?
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2826&limit=no
Yeah, Linux is good at this. “Release early, release often” is wonderful at feeding little bits to the public. I think the vaporware tactic is used to keep what little mindshare remains from migrating to something more alive.
Hmm, thanks for pointing that out. He doesn’t seem to have joined OBOS yet, so maybe he’s still on.
At least the MS PR department knows how to drive hype. You see screenshots of longhorn everywhere, you have “leaked” betas all over the place. The release date? Sometime in 2005 maybe.
They know how to hype a product w/o using the “real soon” tactic. That way people are excited about it, but they don’t get cynical waiting for it. Something most of the other alternate OS companies need to learn.
Why would someone be so stupid that they market something by going out to all exhibitions and stuff only to answer people who ask “When and where can I buy” with the answer “I don’t have a clue”….
>>>>>>>>>>
How long before Win2K came out were we hearing about Cairo? I’ll give you a hint: 1995. Microsoft is already starting the Longhorn hype campaign, and it won’t be out for another two years, at least.
that you are well now, and that you are still with us all.
It is a scary thing to choke, a friend of mine was chewing gum, when he began to choke on it. He was going all blue, but luckily my other friend who was a nurse was there who saved him.
Also great summary.
Schadenfreude and more about companies who promise more than they can actually deliver. Unfortunately Be Inc was the prime example of this. Promising alot and delivering VERY little in the way of hardware support and encouraging third party developers.
Firstly Be should have killed off their PowerPC pet-project alot earlier, secondly, they should have concerntrated on implementing FULLY Unix98 and POSIX specifications as to make life easier for those wanting to port GNU/*NIX/*BSD applications to BeOS.
This is ONE area where Apple has learn leasons. Even before the big boys jumped onto the MacOS X gravy train, Apple already had a small but vocal support group porting software to it and starting up new projects to utilise “MacOS Technologies” such as Caminio.
Once the base was established, they should have appraoched companies such as Macromedia, and said, “how much will it cost you to port [products] to BeOS?”, once that price is establish, BeOS writes a cheque and with in a year or two, the first stream of commercial software would come flowing, thus encouraging hardware vendors to create drivers and thus create a developer ecosystem.
Well, they did do that. BeIA was based on Real products, and included Flash. BeOS R5 Pro included Indeo video and the Frauhofer MP3 encoder.
Well, as wondeful as Mac OS X is, it does not conform to UNIX98 standards. If you check with the Open Group’s web site you’ll see very few Unixes do and NONE comply with UNIX03.
UNIX03 hasn’t been officially released yet. Very few non-SYSVR4-derived Unices comply with ’95 OR ’93. POSIX and the UNIX specification are two very different things.
BeDoper stories. I suppose I should see why the domain is down.
Notes,
First, I’d like to say that I really enjoy using BeOS and would love to meet one other person who uses it too. But following the link and browsing the pictures, I’m not so sure now. Don’t those guys like girls? Not a single female in any of the pictures…
Second, BeOS functions as a nice alternative to Linux or other Unix-like OSes. It’s all about choices. I much prefer the file heirarchy of BeOS to Unix/Linux. And BeOS needs exclusive software titles, not ports of existing programs, to succeed.
Third, I am also concerned about the potential of Zeta to be vaporware. At the same time I was reading it would be “soon”, Yellowtab was soliciting recommendations for hardware to support. At the same time YT was shown at select international locations, they were still negotiating for third-party software. To this day there’s still no list of software included in the various packages, and the final hardware list has not been released. And they’ve had a close call or two with financing.
I have higher hopes for OBOS, even though it’s farther away yet.
Best Wishes,
Bob
I can imagine it would look something like this
John Adobe Sixpack – “Good morning Yellowtab, my name is John Sixpack calling from Adobe. We’ve been hearing about the progress of your new OS and are interested in porting our software to your platform, but from the look of your website, you have 10 more years to go”
Berndt YT – “Was? Wie sprachen sprechen sie? Oh sorry, english I’ve heard about that langauge. Yes we have a product which is really good and kicks MS butt anyday.”
John – “When is the scheduled release date. Will we have enough time to port any of our products close to your release?”
Berndt – “We’ll be out real soon now, so please port everything”
John – “We have some concern of vapourware… can we get a demo and some info about the API and such so we can start working now”
Berndt – “I don’t understand that much english, it’s no vapourware that I know, oh and I hate MS”.
John – “Ehrrr… okey… well, we’d really wanna do business here, can we see something?”
Berndt – “There are videos from one of our demos somewhere on BeShare, oh and we kick MS ass”.
Does it take a NASA engineer to understand why 3rd party keeps away? Or why the rumours of vapourware is all around us?
John Adobe Sixpack – “Good morning Yellowtab, my name is John Sixpack calling from Adobe. We’ve been hearing about the progress of your new OS and are interested in porting our software to your platform, but from the look of your website, you have 10 more years to go”
Yeah, because Adobe’s just thrilled about the prospect of spending millions upon millions upon millions of dollars to port and support BeOS programs in order to capture the apparently huge number of users who (1) use only the BeOS, not Windows or the Mac and (2) would buy the Adobe products.
Sheesh. Is it really that hard? I don’t mean to be rude, but COME ON. It’s a ton of money and there’s no market.
Is the Pegasos pictured there?? Have they shown a BeOS clone running on it?
Geist means also “Spirit”… I think this fits a little better than Ghost into the meaning of BeGeistert…
RE: RE: Greg (IP: —.lsanca1.dsl-verizon.net)
They only started to pay for mp3 support because one of the authors of an mp3 ecoding programme was raked over the coals by the Frauhofer Institute. As for Real and Flash, who gives a crap about plugins? what is more important, plug ins for end lusers or applications for people who want to use their operating system for its original purpose, aka, “Media Operating System”. I’m sorry, but it isn’t much of a “Media Operating System” when it lacks basic media tools.
RE: Chris (IP: —.bur.adelphia.net)
Who said MacOS X conformed to the UNIX 98 Specifications? Most commercial UNIX’s only conform to the UNIX 95, and Solaris, IIRC is about the only one conforming to the UNIX 98 specification.
What Apple has done, however, is make life easier for those porting applications from *NIX/*BSD to MacOS X. Had BeOS taken that approach there would be a OpenOffice.org port instead of the “oh, we’re waiting for a GTK2 port” excuse they hang from their website. Had BeOS had the necessary framework witten from day one, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Hence the reason why I said that BeOS/Yellow Tab need to approach companies and cut the likes of Adobe and Macromedia a cheaque to pay for the porting of applications. Adobe and Macromedia are not charities and if they want the applications on their platform (with a small market) they need to show them the money.
RE: Bobthearch (IP: —.zianet.com)
People DON’T want new applications, they want to use the same applications but on a different operating system. Unless you can promise a user that within 2years you can create a Photoshop replacement with all the features and plugin support, don’t even bother about attempting to create it.
I guess I feel differently than “people” then. If I want to use Photoshop, I can already do that in Windows. If I want to use OpenOffice, I can already do that in Windows or Linux. etc., etc.
One of the major attractions I have to new and different operating systems is to have access to a ~new~ and ~different~ set of applications. To make a new OS that really stands out, you need applications that stand out, not the same old titles found everyplace else.
Of course there needs to be apps that fill common needs, such as an office suite, browser, and Photoshop clone.
Each operating system has it’s own potential strengths and weaknesses, and you can’t really take advangage of these if the software isn’t custom-coded.
That’s just how I look at it…
Best Wishes,
Bob
One could easily say that OpenOffice.org is more than adequate. Heck, just look at Wordperfect Suite compared to Office XP. IMHO, Wordperfect Suite IS the superior product, however, you can drum that mantra into their head for as long as you want, however, it won’t change the fact that people want to run Microsoft Office because that is what they’re used to.
Imagine if one didn’t encourage established third party developers the operating system we are talking about, aka, BeOS, how are you going to sell a completely DIFFERENT product to established Adobe customers? or established Macromedia customers? what will your angle be? how can you justify the re-training required? there there enough compelling improvements to justify the investment?
These are questions that the customer will ask, and whether you like it or not, people aren’t going to jump on some 1.0 version of some application developed by a group of “enthusisasts”. Companies are conservative and by hooker by crook, they aren’t going to make strategic shifts in their investment unless they see a real return.
Lets look at Linux for example. How long did it have to wait in the wings for it to be finally considered a “possibility” in the enterprise? if you are Joe “Photoshop replacement” developer, are you willing to wait 7years before your application is taken seriously? do you have enough money to fund yourself for many years of losses? is there a venture fund out there run by someone willing to give an enthusisatic developer a shot at developing his/her own company?
These are things you have to ask yourself before assuming that some how “unestablished” software houses will rise at a reasonable speed to meet the demands of customers. BeOS has proven that unless you have the established third party software houses on bought, you might as well close up shop and save your pennies.
Real wasn’t a plugin. Wagner, the BeIA core interface, was almost entirely based on Real stuff. BeIA had Personal Java, too. Too bad MS and Compaq killed it.
Oh great, yet ANOTHER “blame Compaq and Microsoft” for Be’s bad business decisions. Instead of blaming all and sundry, how about the “loyal BeOS supports club anonymous” accept that they made some stupid business decisions that ultimately caused their own demise.
Real was a plugin, plain and simply. Unless you can point to something more substaintial than a “player” for real media, that is all that was included with it. Get used to it and stop re-writing history.
I assume you know the story. Yes, Be made bad business decisions. But Compaq and Microsoft were behind BeIA’s failure. Microsoft did it even before with blocking Hitachi’s OEM BeOS. Compaq sold the technology and the secrets with which they were entrusted by Be to Microsoft. That is undisputed. Pray tell, what could have they done to survive? Sell used cars? Be never made a profit throughout its whoe existence, despite all the investment.