BeOS Sneaks In
By Ryan Tate
December 21, 1999
Get-Rich Tip: Unite the toasters of the world. Ignore the bourgeoisie.
Steve Jobs wouldn't dream of letting the MacOS run a GE appliance or a
low-end Dell box--no, nothing but exquisitely molded, multicolored,
museum-worthy, Apple-branded plastic for his user-friendly operating
system. And the folks over at Palm Computing are pretty uptight about
where their Pilot's popular PalmOS gets to play, granting just one
company a license to use the operating system. Larry Ellison
meanwhile--well, even if he let Oracle 8i shack up in a four-ounce
Nokia, we'd probably be talking about a five-figure phone.
Enter Be (BEOS), headed by Jean-Louis Gassee, who, like Jobs, was
once a top Apple executive. Unlike Jobs, Gassee bets his company will
win by taking over the brains of not just classy, expensive plastic boxes
but also of cheap, ubiquitous ones. Be saw its shares rise 11 percent
yesterday as it announced an agreement allowing Compaq (CPQ) to use
its operating system in stripped-down PCs, Web-surfing tablets and other
small appliances. The deal was part of a new strategy to target
information appliances -- the proletariat of computing platforms. Be also
provided the brains for Microworkz' $300 PC and for a low-end line of
Hitachi computers.
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