The Little Operating System That Might Be

By Art Wittmann  About a year ago, the industry was buzzing about the possibility of Apple Computer buying Be Inc. The operating system and hardware company, founded by Jean-Louis Gassee and a pack of smart engineering types, has some formidable products--in particular its operating system. The thought a year ago was that the BeOS would be the successor to the MacOS and would propel Apple ahead of Microsoft, at least in terms of the technical design of the operating system. For what appears to be a number of reasons, this did not come to pass. Last month, however, Be was in the news again with the impending release of its operating system for the Intel platform. As you read this, Be should be handing out copies of its OS at the company's March developers' conference . Porting applications to the Intel platform is supposed to be extremely quick and easy, so one would imagine that it will be a "no-brainer" for developers, particularly if it's just a matter of sticking two binaries on the same CD. Shades of NeXT The Be story sounds a lot like the NeXT saga--but only to a point. Both companies based their product on the Mach kernel, both produced hardware for their operating systems to run on. But I think that's where the similarities end. Steve Jobs wanted to replace the Macintosh, prove that he was still the vision kid and get back at that guy who used to "sell sugar-water." Be seems much more focused on creating a system that can truly do things the present-day crop of desktop OSes can't do. The company is currently focused on high-end digital video and audio editing--a task at which neither the MacOS nor any version of Windows is particularly good. The Intel version of Be's OS initially will not run Windows applications. This would certainly seem like the deathblow for the OS in the open market, and at first glance, I think it is. It's also clear that Be's intention is not to go after Windows, and that's the smart play. While Ray Noorda and his band of happy lawyers beat on Microsoft from one side and the Justice Department attacks from the other side, Be can happily build its OS, have it offer great support for Java and help its developers create exciting applications that, to date, haven't been seen on either the Intel or Macintosh platforms. In the end, it just may turn out that rather than Be going after the Windows market, the Windows market just may come clamoring to Be. Spotting Change Intel's Andy Grove, in his recent book, Only the Paranoid Survive (Doubleday), talks about inflection points in the industry. His premise is that it's companies that miss the inflection points that suffer the loss of their market share and examples abound. John Ackers, IBM's CEO in 1985, said, "we are not a networking company." Too bad, IBM. Digital in the mid- to-late-1980s caught the RISC processor wave just as Sun and HP were riding it to success. Too bad for Digital. It's hard to see the inflection point that Be may have found. If it were easy, there would be many Andy Groves running around. It could be Java, it could be the need for an OS that can easily handle full-motion video and high-quality audio. It could be something else completely, or it could be that there's no inflection point here at all. But if there is, it seems clear that Microsoft may be distracted enough to miss it. I'd love to see all this antitrust talk go away because of market forces. Maybe Be can do it. Maybe Ray Noorda's Caldera can do it with OpenLinux. I don't know who's got the best chance, and frankly, I'm not sure I care. But I do believe the key to success here is for companies like Be to move forward. Don't glance left or right, just stare straight ahead at your goal. The market you find just might be considerably bigger than you ever imagined. Be is the only company I've s een doing this recently. I just hope Be keeps it up. Art Wittmann can be reached at awittmann@nwc.com.

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