Stardate 20010803.0712 (On Screen): Be corporation just laid off a bunch more people; it's at the end of the road for bleeding money and will soon be dead. Its alternative OS for the Mac died quietly, taken down by Apple, and it missed its chance to be acquired by Apple and become the basis for OSX because it didn't have Steve Jobs. (I still think that Apple would have been better served with Be than with Next; OSX would have been on the market at least a year sooner. On the other hand, without Jobs Apple would probably have been dead by now.) On the PC BeOS couldn't compete because it never got a sufficient weight of apps, even though the OS itself was always excellent. It threw in the towel (and began to give it away) when it decided to shift to trying to make its OS the basis for a "net appliance" just as that market failed, but it did manage to sell its BeIA OS to Sony for use in a product. Alas, Sony's product hit the market just recently, in the middle of a tech slump and just as a couple of other net appliances from other vendors became commercial flops. Sony's appliance is also not expected to succeed. So Be laid off a bunch of people recently, leaving just its core group of engineers. The resulting organization is not commercially viable as an independent company because it no longer has a sales staff. The speculation is that it was being done to prepare the company for acquisition, and that is what this article suggests actually has happened. If so, we'll learn about it in the next few days. I hope it's true.
But the article doesn't say who the buyer is. There's long been speculation that it might be Sony, which would make sense. But that's not the only possibility, especially if Sony has already given up on its network appliance, and I'd like to suggest another. Network appliances are not a viable business, but PDA's are, especially PDAs merged with cell phones. I suggest the following possibility: Be will be purchased by a major cell phone company to produce a competitor for Symbian and Palm and WinCE for use in smart cell phones. None of those three is totally satisfactory; each has its flaws. It is also an emerging business and looks like the wave of the future for the cell phone industry, and it's the only place where a "net appliance" really does make sense. Be has already shown that it is capable of porting its code to different platforms (from PPC to the x86) and should have no difficulty in porting to ARM (the de facto standard for cell phones). Their code is fast and efficient and should have no difficulty running on underpowered portable devices, especially if the screen is small. The GUI would have to be reworked but that's not a serious problem. So my dark horse for an acquisition is my former employer, Qualcomm. (I have no inside information on this; it's been months since I've talked to anyone there. I'm just speculating.) (discuss)
