In 1996 Mac users were far more familiar with BeOS than NeXTSTEP. Even though it was a developer release, Be was marketing heavily to Mac users (like giving away free CDs) and BeOS could run on Macs so Mac users could try it side-by-side with MacOS and form firsthand impressions. (I was triple-booting MacOS, BeOS, and Linux on my Power Mac with a bunch of Jaz carts.) Meanwhile NeXTSTEP was expensive and ran on expensive non-Mac hardware.

BeOS was also optimized (probably over-optimized) for first impressions; the immaturity and architectural mistakes were hidden behind a facade of "OMG it's so fast and pretty". The BeOS GUI with its cartoony 32x32 icons was also a lot closer to MacOS than NeXTSTEP with it's huge high-DPI GUI, so BeOS looked like "Mac done right" while NeXT was a foreign culture.

So yeah, NeXT was better but most Mac users had no way of knowing that at the time.

Agree with everything you said and NeXT was the right call (even sans Jobs). Apple needed mature ecosystem, libraries, etc, not just a base OS.

However, BeOS was far more stable/mature than its 'developer release' status implied. I remember how blown away people were at the dev release in 1996 by how solid it was, not just by how forward thinking its features were.

I don't think multiuser would have been a showstopper for release if BeOS was acquired by Apple. They could have put out 2-3 versions of a single user OS and few would have cared.

something I have been wondering about for years, having been around: was Be actually acquisition bait from day one for Apple? I am convinced that NeXT wasn't; they just didn't build something that was designed for acquisition.

But Be, Inc. and BeOS really strike me as the kind of design, company, compromises, focus and leadership/team that I've come to associate with startups that are actually designed to be acquired by the executive's former employer after some time.

I would love to know if this is true, though in my experience, that is usually only known to the founders and executives except in the really obvious cases.

It was started by a former apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee [1]. At apple he said he wanted a kernel on macOS[2]. When he started BE they did develop their own hardware (BE Box). They eventually decided to port it other hardware (hardware is expensive). Microsoft had a strangle hold on most PC manufacturers and the BEbox was power PC so it made sense to try to get Mac clones to use it (There was a brief period in the 90s where apple clones existed.). I got a disk and tried it on a "Power computing" mac clone. It was kinda amazing compared to macos8. But the lack of software made it hard day to day.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gassée

[2] https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-11-getting-the-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

I'm aware of all that history. The part I'm asking about is whether his exit plan was Apple and when that exit plan went with the other option the company was not viable.

This is very common for "startups" founded by executives who come from a company they know is failing to execute on something critical.

Be smells like this.

One wonders, what if someone else had bought Be?

Someone did: PalmSource (the software spinoff from Palm). It was to be the basis for their Palm OS “Cobalt”, which was eventually abandoned.

Or by “someone else”, did you mean someone other than PalmSource?

Let’s be honest, though: most new OSes don’t enjoy much success or longevity. The only successful new arrival I can remember recently was Android, and it had the backing of Google, and was aimed at a relatively new market. It also borrowed heavily from established tech: Linux kernel, JDK and JVM.

I doubt there’s more than a handful companies that could have turned BeOS into something big, and of those, Apple was probably their best bet.

Someone who actually had a chance to do something with BeOS, and of sticking around for longer than a few years.

Minor notes:

* BeOS was evaluated by Apple as a Copland replacement (along with Solaris, NT, and NeXTSTEP).

* MacOS X discarded DPS for Quartz so it didn't turn out to be much of a feature. But very few applications touched that directly so it wasn't much of a porting issue.

* There was more UNIX and AppKit-based software available for NeXTSTEP than for BeOS but nobody in the Mac world cared about that. Quark were the only company that really blew the transition, but they blew it badly.