[News] Executive Update - St. Louis and Beyond | ANN.lu |
Posted on 06-Feb-2001 22:33 GMT by Christian Kemp | 34 comments View flat View list |
There's a new executive update available at Amiga. Bill McEwen says Contrary to the rumors and what many people are saying about our demise, or that we are going to have the same fate of the others before us, we have a big surprise for all of them, and promises that all will be known in six weeks at the St. Louis show.
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Executive Update - St. Louis and Beyond : Comment 25 of 34 | ANN.lu |
Posted by WattsM on 08-Feb-2001 23:00 GMT | In reply to Comment 23 (Keith Blakemore-Noble): As a somewhat ascerbic note, Be never said that they couldn't reverse-engineer the way LinuxPPC did. They said that they *wouldn't.*
If you paid much attention to the history of BeOS, you'd note that it was *never* ported to the PowerMac platform as such: it was ported to the Power Computing platform. Be cancelled the BeBox because they saw a much better opportunity with Macintosh "clones"--by licensing BeOS to Power Computing and having it shipped with every new Power Computer machine, they wouldn't have to be in the hardware business, their distribution would be much wider, and they'd be getting OEM licenses for every clone sold.
Then, Steve Jobs returned. This was two nails in the coffin: Jobs didn't like the clones, and had no reason to like software that was essentially written to support them. And, Jobs and Gassee had no love lost between them. Given that Apple's refusal to share design info was a direct strike at the business model Be had been relying on, it would not have been paranoia on the part of Be to assume that reverse engineering on *their* part would have been met with animosity that would never have been directed at the Linux geeks. (And Be couldn't use the work LinuxPPC did, as some people keep insisting; incorporating GPL code directly into their proprietary OS would not have gone over very well.)
In summation, BeOS died on the PowerMac platform for political reasons, and the politics were not Be's. Q.E.D., indeed. |
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