BeOS's focus was and still is to create an OS that trades off throughput for latency on several levels (desktop and multimedia holy grails).
BeOS was a very slow OS, but it felt very responsive.
I think it died in part because of the direction Be took (the Be Box, etc.) and in part because they tried to compete with Microsoft on their turf, people would see the OS demoed and be very impressed untill they heard there was no Outlook, nor any MS Office. However I hope Linux one day will be able to give us similar responsive computing.
Well, another reason it died was because they shifted their focus from keeping their OS cutting edge to developing a Internet Appliance version of its OS and trying to get companies to use it. However, we know IA's still aren't selling like hotcakes or selling at all, and so they died...
[quote author=cj171 link=board=10;threadid=7850;start=0#msg75833 date=1072459625]
Well, another reason it died was because they shifted their focus from keeping their OS cutting edge to developing a Internet Appliance version of its OS and trying to get companies to use it. However, we know IA's still aren't selling like hotcakes or selling at all, and so they died...
[/quote]
Agreed, they did make some stupid marketing moves - but at least now that Palm owns the IP, I guess we will see the technology live on.
This post does not negate the preceeding comments about BeOS being a moribund OS. On the bright side I finally bit the bullet and installed it on my "big" box. Things appear to working quite well including networking. I was very glad to see that Mozilla Firefox is available for BeOS and (so far) it appears to be working quite nicely. It will be interesting to see how soon I hit a roadblock and have a requirement that BeOS cannot fulfill. I do not anticipate that this will take very long, but it would be nice to be surprised.
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