Many low-end Mac users lament Apple's choice of NeXTstep over the
BeOS as the foundation of Mac OS X. Many arguments have been made
on technical merits, and many blame the demise of Be, Inc., on Apple
and Microsoft. The following is an in-depth look at the demise of Be
and reflections on Apple's choice of NeXT. Hopefully this will debunk
some common ideas about BeOS and lay this debate to rest.
The spectacular failure of BeOS is often blamed on external forces,
for example, Microsoft muscling them out of the marketplace.
Supposedly, the incredible sophistication of BeOS struck fear into the
hearts and minds of its competitors.
Microsoft pressured OEMs to not bundle BeOS on their systems.
Big Deal. Microsoft has done this with every competing operating
system. Is it fair? No. Did Microsoft willfully and purposefully
destroy Be? Probably not.
Be made several missteps common to innovators; furthermore, they
misread the marketplace and developed an unsustainable business model.
Let us break down some of their mistakes.
Classic Mistakes
These are mistakes that have been made over and over again by
companies and should have been avoided.
1. Not-quite-Unix
BeOS had a powerful command line and Unix-like underpinnings that
could compile and run POSIX compliant software. Every Unix-like
operating system has failed in the marketplace except Linux (which is
free, and for all intents and purposes it is Unix). The Amiga
Operating System was developed with similar goals in mind, and that
particular operating system withered and died as well. Being able to
compile POSIX compliant software is not a marketable advantage (even
Windows NT can do it).
The lesson: Unless you are actually going to include full Unix
services and compatibility, like Linux or the Mac OS X, being Unix-like
is no advantage.
2. Please the developers
BeOS was designed by geeks for geeks (we will revisit when
discussing marketing mistakes). Designing an OS with fantastic
underpinnings does not sell software. Look at the success of Windows 95
and, for that matter, Mac OS 9. A 64-bit database-driven file
system and pervasively threaded libraries on top of an efficient kernel
may please developers and geeks, but it doesn't sell software. A
software company looks at how much money they can make developing for a
certain platform, not how easy it is to write great software. In order
for BeOS to succeed as a platform, a lot of volunteer effort and/or
some sort of industry partnerships were needed. While there was an
enthusiastic BeOS community, Linux surely consumed most of the
enthusiast developers. Be did not get solid industry partners until it
was far too late.
The lesson: You don't attract developers and partners with superior
technology unless you show them how they will profit from it.
3. The BeBox
Proprietary hardware is difficult enough to develop, especially if
you do not have established customers. IBM can make huge profits from
its expensive proprietary mainframes because they have established
customers and an established market. Likewise, Apple can make profits
from its psuedo-proprietary hardware because they have a base of users
and a place in the market. Consider the fact that the BeBox's main
differentiators from other computers were dual-processors (expensive,
even if you use cheap processors) and a Geek-port, it is not hard to
see how the hardware side of Be failed. How much capital did they lose
developing it?
The lesson: You don't make money off anything unless there is a
market for it or you create a market for it. This is even truer of
proprietary hardware.
4. The GUI will save us
Faith in a slick user interface is an easy mistake to make. If it is
fairly easy to navigate through files and the windows look pretty, then
all is well. This is just plain wrong. No matter how good a GUI looks
or how responsive it is, it will not attract and retain users unless it
is an enabler. The early Mac OS was not flashy at all with stark black
and white icons, but it enabled users to do things on a desktop
computer they were unable to do before. By the time a polished
iteration of BeOS was available, Windows 98 and Mac OS 8.x were already
available - and much better at connecting to the Internet, sharing
files, and printing, tasks that users routinely complete.
The lesson: A slick GUI won't save the operating system. (Even Apple
had to re-learn this one after releasing Mac OS X - iTunes and the
other bundled apps are all enabling tools to attract users.)
Business and Marketing Mistakes
These are mistakes that Be made that illustrate poor planning and a
poor understanding of the market.
1. Market it to Geeks
A machine with a configurable and user-programmable expansion port?
A 64-bit database driven file system? An advanced kernel? These are not
selling points unless you already have a market. Until then, they are
merely a foundation for future releases.
Using these attributes of the operating system to sell it (to geeks)
is perhaps one of the all-time worst business decisions in history.
There may have been some logic in thinking that the geeks would then
develop great software for it, but it is hardly a profit-generating
business plan. It also runs counter to thirty years of making computers
easier to use and understand. Be eventually expanded their marketing
focus but continued to use the technical excellence of their OS as
their core selling point; it was too little too late.
The lesson here is quite simple (if blunt): If your target market
consists of users who wish to program their own expansion ports, you
are bound to bleed money.
2. What's a Server?
BeOS debuted in 1995, which was also marked the beginning of the
Internet's meteoric rise. BeOS was designed to be a personal computer
operating system. Unfortunately, at the time of its debut and the years
thereafter, the real growth was in server operating systems.
Furthermore, the idea that a personal computer operating system should
share a code base with the server operating system became prevalent at
this time. This was largely due to Microsoft trying to move users to
NT-based technologies and hardware companies who loved the idea of
forcing resource-intensive server "plumbing" into the desktop (which
would drive their hardware sales). While BeOS was efficient, it lacked
the network/server-oriented features of Unix and even Windows NT. Be
was basically caught with their pants down. Two years later, BeOS was
retrofitted with some server tools and paraded around trade shows
running the Apache Web server software. But again, it was too little
too late.
The lesson: If you don't correctly forecast the market, you are
forced to spend resources reacting instead of selling products. There
may have been no way for Be to predict this; you win some, you loose
some, as they say.
3. What's that Internet thingy?
BeOS also missed the boat on the Internet phenomenon. The Web
browsers were usually one or more generations behind their counterparts
on the Mac and PC with very few third-party plugins supported. Internet
connectivity was added seemingly as an afterthought. But BeOS could
play eight streaming QuickTime videos! Who cares? The Web browser, and,
to some extent, America Online, became the defining personal computing
applications of the 90s. Instead of building a decent browser, Be
reverse engineered QuickTime.
The lesson: If you don't have a good browser, you don't have a
chance on the desktop. Period.
Apple Drops a Bomb on Be
Most BeOS aficionados are convinced that Apple chose NeXTstep as the
core of Mac OS X because Steve Jobs was key in making the
decision. Apple is first and foremost a business, and if Apple could
have made more money buying BeOS and retrofitting it as Mac OS X, they
would have.
This leads to one of the most contentious BeOS myths; that BeOS was
a simple drag-and-drop replacement for the Mac OS. Many Be enthusiasts
believe this because classic Mac OS applications could already be run
from within BeOS. It sounds plausible.
However, BeOS needed serious usability engineering. The operating
system could, as previously mentioned, run eight QuickTime video
streams at once, but it didn't enable the user to do very many useful
things. All of the tuning and elegance was poured into features
transparent to the user, like the file system.
This idea also rests on the assumption that developers would port
their applications to BeOS. Because BeOS had no "Carbon" layer,
developers would have had to essentially develop two versions of their
software for the Mac platform, one legacy and one BeOS-based. Because
the graphics subsystem and GUI were substantially different between the
two, as were the Mac OS toolbox and the BeOS development APIs, it would
have been like writing the application for a whole new platform.
Furthermore, there weren't a lot of experienced BeOS developers in the
field to work on porting applications.
Developers simply didn't want to do this, and Apple understood.
Whether it chose Be or NeXT, Apple would still have had to write a
"Carbon" layer to encourage development of applications for the new
operating system. This would allow developers to write one program that
runs on both platforms. Since both operating systems would need a
"Carbon" layer and a lot of usability engineering and retooling, the
decision probably came down to three points.
- There was and is a wealth of highly experienced developers who are
familiar with Unix. There also was and is a smaller but active and
experienced subset of NeXTstep (Cocoa) developers. While not as
technically elegant as BeOS, having trained talent available to port
your applications and debug your OS is great advantage in favor of
NeXT.
- Unix already had an established and proven core of network services
and server capabilities. Choosing NeXT gives Apple the option of
seriously competing in the server arena, if it so chooses. BeOS would
have to be tested, validated, and developed for some time to achieve
the maturity of BSD in this area.
- The most cynical reason of all, of course, is profit. Which
operating system will drive your hardware sales - the light and
efficient operating system that can play eight QuickTime video streams
on a G3 or the huge, big-iron, Unix-based operating system? Apple is
first and foremost a hardware company. The most useful advantages BeOS
offered the end user were memory and space efficiency. By the time
Apple gave up on Copland, hard drives were already in the
multi-gigabyte range and standard memory was hovering around 32 MB. The
advantage of a small memory footprint had diminished significantly. The
small size and memory footprint were no advantage at all, as Apple
wished to drive sales of new hardware.
Other Thoughts
It might surprise you that BeOS is one of my all time favorite
operating systems, right up there with the Amiga OS. I am, after all, a
geek. While I applaud Apple for choosing NeXT as the core of Mac
OS X, they certainly are not without fault.
The ten-year anniversary of the Power Mac is nearly upon us. I
remember when System 7 debuted we were promised a blazingly fast, fully
native operating system that would take advantage of the PowerPC
processor. Well, a decade later the promise is broken. My Power Mac 7100 will never get such
an operating system from Apple, despite their promises.
But the record needed to be set straight about BeOS. To sum it up,
contrast the summaries below - one reflecting the opinion of a BeOS
zealot, the other reflecting the opinion of this author. The truth is
yours to decide.
Zealot: BeOS died because Microsoft and Apple worked
feverishly against it. BeOS was so advanced, they were worried about
their own markets. BeOS was so elegant and fast, it could run eight
QuickTime video streams at once. It hardly took up any hard drive space
or system memory, and it was rock-solid stable. Steve Jobs cheated Be
out of becoming Mac OS X. He just had to have his other baby,
NeXTstep, as the foundation of Mac OS X.
Author: BeOS had technically brilliant underpinnings that
allowed the user to do amazingly useless things like play eight
QuickTime video streams at once and search their hard drive files in a
very intelligent way. It was not very good at printing or Web surfing,
and it did not enable the user to accomplish anything new. It was an
unproven server platform, an unproven Java platform, and there was a
dearth of experienced BeOS programmers. Apple made a wise choice in
choosing NeXT. BeOS wasn't killed by the big boys; it was slowly choked
through a series of monumentally bad decisions, most of which had been
made by other companies in the past and could have been avoided. It was
a great operating system in all the wrong ways, and someone at Be
should have realized this.
Further Reading
- Apple's Next Direction, Dan
Knight, Mac Musings, 1999.08.02
- BeOS or NeXT: Did Apple Make the
Wrong Choice?, Jonathan Ploudre, Back & Forth, 2001.04.16
- BeOS or NeXT: The Right Choice,
David Puett, My Turn, 2001.04.18
- BeOS and BFS, Jonathan
Ploudre, Back & Forth, 2001.04.20
- User Interface: Mac vs. BeOS,
Jonathan Ploudre, Back & Forth, 2001.04.23
- Using BeOS on a Power Mac: A
modern OS for an older Power Mac, Jonathan Ploudre, Back &
Forth, 2001.04.30
- NeXT: Apple's Right Choice,
Jonathan Ploudre, Back & Forth, 2001.05.07
- Why BeOS Was So Different, Dan
Knight, Mac Musings, 2002.01.02
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
