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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian Davidson who wrote (68540)	11/13/1998 5:03:00 PM
From: Badger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

More Intel news - sorry if this has been posted already. I'd include the link but I pulled this off the NASDAQ news site. *************************************************** Be Inc. Abuzz About Intel Investment, BeOS (11/13/98; 12:00 a.m. ET) By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times Fledgling operating system developer Be is expected to roll out version 4.0 of BeOS at Comdex next week. This is on top of getting two recent shots in the arm: Hitachi has agreed to bundle BeOS onto a PC that will be sold in Japan, and Be executives confirmed Intel has taken an equity investment in the company. Be said it expects at least one more OEM to announce support for its OS before the end of the year. Following Hitachi's announcement in Tokyo, Be executives told EE Times Intel has invested an undisclosed amount in Be over the past year as both companies worked to optimize Be's OS for the Intel platform. Be and Intel are to make a formal announcement next week at the Comdex trade show. Financial backing from Intel "opens doors at a lot of companies for us," said Jim Cook, vice president of sales for Be, in Menlo Park, Calif. John Antone, co-general manager for Intel Japan K.K., in Tokyo, said he was not familiar enough with the business relationship between Intel and Be to comment on the equity investment. But he said Intel's support of the BeOS is part of the company's effort to encourage applications and OS developers to optimize to Intel's platform. The BeOS was originally tied to Macintosh clones, but after Apple cut loose its ties with Be and Mac cloners, the company shifted to the PC camp. Word of Intel's investment in Be comes only weeks after Intel announced it was investing in Red Hat software, a provider of the Linux OS. Antone said Intel's partnership with Be does not undermine the semiconductor giant's long-standing relationship with Microsoft. Still, the news emerged in the same week other Intel executives had testified in Microsoft's antitrust case, alleging the software company had threatened to withhold support for future Intel CPUs if Intel did not abandon some of its own software efforts. Be also downplayed the effect the new OS will have on Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. Cook said the BeOS is meant to complement Windows and he hopes for a "peaceful coexistence" with Microsoft. Even so, the new BeOS aims to displace many Windows functions. For one, it has its own browser software, an alternative Internet gateway on a Windows PC. Moreover, the BeOS does not hew to the DirectX API, the cornerstone of Microsoft's multimedia initiatives. "While we have the greatest respect for the fine company Microsoft is, we don't see DirectX as an end-all to multimedia," said Jean-Louis Gassee, Be's chairman and CEO. The hallmark of the OS is its ability to handle large quantities of multimedia-rich data in real time, largely because the OS is not burdened by the legacy issues of Windows. It's also small, with an 8-megabyte kernel that doubles to 16 MB with TCP/IP extensions included. Intel's Antone said the size and freedom from legacy makes it an attractive vehicle for multimedia. "It's a lighter operating system, and does things that will let you run applications in parallel. The lack of legacy — and the same is true for hardware — is baggage that limits compatibility but also increases its flexibility," he said.