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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gassée
[2] https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-11-getting-the-...
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.
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.
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.