08 May 2001

A Death Foretold Way back when, the journalist Scot Hacker was asked to write an article on the Be Operating System (BeOS) and fell in love. He subsequently wrote the BeOS Bible, and has been championing its cause ever since (Byte columns and BeOS Tip Server). Twas a noble and audacious idea, an entirely modern operating system, unburdened by backwards compatibility, but many months ago, Be acknowledged its failure to make a commercial go of it with BeOS, and changed strategies to emphasise its software for the appliance market. It has had some success, including the evilla by Sony featuring BeIA. However, Be is now in serious financial straights, and recently laid off 25% of it's workforce, including, Scott suspects, those engineers still working on the BeOS. This is the best informed statement of where Be and BeOS is at that you're likely to read. 9:13:16 AM