alt Hacker NewsThey were never going to compete with Microsoft even if MS hadn’t screwed them (which MS definitely did). At the time, MS was invincible in the enterprise market. Be’s only path to success was with Apple. Jean-Louis Gassée was negotiating the buy-out with Apple but he wanted more than Apple was willing to pay and Jobs was the key acquihire at Next, before people started talking about “acquihire” as a concept. Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t going to acquire both Be and Next.
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microtonal • yesterday at 7:01 PM
I recall that they had one OEM who wanted to install BeOS as a preinstalled option Hitachi), but then Microsoft threatened to raise Windows license prices in retaliation.
A little search gives a reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20131109045719/http://www.intern...
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Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0]
There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow.
0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/