Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
It's fast, it's fresh and it already has a cult following. But will the new high-end operating system find a market?
Mar 4, 1998 | Nestled into two stories of an office building in the heart of Silicon Valley, the engineers of software startup Be Inc. are just beginning to wind down from the months-long push to develop a version of their brand-new operating system, the BeOS, for Intel's processors. They've been putting in 80-hour weeks, working through the early mornings -- doing what engineers do when they work at a startup company and really love it.
What makes Be different from other startups is that its customers have begun to really love them back. With barely a product on the market, Be already has a cult following.
The company's sole product is a next-generation operating system aimed at video and multimedia creators. Once the BeOS for Intel processors ships on March 12 -- ahead of its originally announced schedule -- Be quietly plans to install its BeOS side-by-side with Windows and the MacOS on both Pentium and PowerPC machines. For malcontents on both sides of the PC vs. Mac religious war, Be's heretical OS will be an easy path to agnosticism.
And the doubters are following. "In my opinion," says Scot Hacker, who writes for ZDNet's BeHive, "religious attitudes about OSs turn more people off than on. The way to prove your worth is with the goods. Show people in the real world how much better things could be. Don't spin your wheels in online forums beating each other up. Promotion is one thing, zealotry is another."
But there are Be zealots, too. The proliferation of Be news sites, user groups and even an Onion-style pseudo-news site, BeDope, is a little startling considering the company hasn't shipped a full version of its product yet. And Be itself is lavishing praise and attention on its fans -- especially its small-time developers. Since its OS is incompatible with every existing platform, Be desperately needs people to write applications. And if developers are going to switch to Be, they're going to need some personal reassurances.
But isn't this a tough sell? If a big, established company like Apple can't hold onto developers in a Microsoft-dominated world, how can a little startup like Be?
For starters, though the shadow of Apple inevitably hangs over Be -- which was founded by former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassie and almost bought by Apple back in 1996 -- Be is determined to do everything differently from Apple.
"Apple is the epitome of what we don't want to be," says Be software engineer Dominic Giampaolo. "At Be, if there's anybody who makes fun of us, it's us. There's no sense we're descended from heaven to touch upon the masses and deliver them from mediocrity. Any pretentiousness is really looked down upon."
Beyond the cultural differences between the two companies, the BeOS is easily as powerful as Apple's next-generation Rhapsody operating system -- with fully supported symmetric multiprocessing (which means every application written for Be can harness multiple processors on a single computer) and multithreading, which allows many programs to hum along at a nice clip simultaneously. And unlike Rhapsody, BeOS is ready to ship. On Intel machines. Right now.
Finally, Be has captured the imagination of an adventurous crowd of devotees in a way that Apple hasn't managed for years. "The BeOS is the only major OS innovation of the last couple of years that draws people who have seen their favorite platform perish (Amiga, Atari, Acorn, Apple)," says Hans Speijer, co-creator of Be Leading Edge.
Amiga fans' hard-core devotion to the platform makes Apple nuts look lackadaisical. And they're used to writing most of their own software to keep their machines running, so pitching in to write for Be is no big deal. Meanwhile, fans of high-end Silicon Graphics systems may find it appealing to switch to the vastly cheaper BeOS -- and bring their favorite UNIX programs with them. It's not by coincidence that Be is recruiting most of its engineers from these two camps these days, according to Erich Ringwalde, its VP of engineering.
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