Firstly, I think I have to say 'define "failed".' The company is sadly dead and gone, swallowed by PalmSource. BeOS tech was used to build the ARM-native, multitasking, media-savvy PalmOS 6 "Cobalt" -- which sadly never shipped on any devices. PalmSource was then in turn swallowed by Access Corp of Japan.

These guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_(company)

Still alive, to quote GladOS. It provides the Kindle web browser, for instance.

Second, BeOS has been reborn as Haiku, which is also very much alive, and includes what Be code it legally can (the Tracker, mainly).

Haiku is IMHO the most complete/most interesting desktop FOSS out there. Haiku is now self-hosting and recently entered beta, after a long gestation. There's very little manpower behind it, so progress is slow, but it is moving.

So, significant influence, I think it's fair to say. BeOS shipped, it sold, I reviewed v5 and it remains my favourite x86 OS ever written. (Yeah, I'm biased. Sue me.)

I think you’re forcing your definition of “successful” a little. I’m not going to disagree with you that BeOS was awesome; it still remains one of my all time favourite desktop OSs. But regardless it wasn’t commercially successful and thus isn’t sold to consumers any longer.

Haiku is an interesting one. I’d put it in the same category as ReactOS. It’s successful in the sense that it’s an open source project that’s under active development. However they’re still essentially just hobbiest platforms so I wouldn’t even rank them successful when compared to Linux on the desktop (eg Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) let alone successful compared to commercial platforms like Windows nor OS X.

It really is a great shame BeOS wasnt more successful though, it was an amazing platform (even without framing it in the context of the shit that was around at the time: Windows 9x and Mac OS 9). Sadly for Haiku, desktop computing has moved on and I just don’t think there’s any need for a classic BeOS desktop any more.

> Linux is an outlier

Linux was long the go-to OS for cheap servers running on cheap hardware.

When the dominant computing paradigm shifted to large arrays of cheap boxes (map-reduce -> Hadoop -> cloud) Linux was in the right place at the right time.

Linux was already pretty big by the time that had happened. Plus it was BSD that was originally favoured as the cheap goto OS by ISPs (before Linux really took off).

Without wanting to start a flamewar, I honestly think it was the GPL licencing that made Linux what it is. BSD was more mature, arguably better designed and was already in use and battle tested. But GPL forced collaboration a little more where and I think that really appealed to hackers.

(I’m not arguing that GPL is better nor worse than BSD/MIT/whatever. I have no strong allegiances with either side of the camp)