Yep. OEMs were not allowed to sell dual-boot systems if they wanted to keep buying cheap MS licenses. I think they lost that lawsuit, but it was long after BeOS closed up their commercial operations.

Didn't Be publicly offer up a free Be OS license to the first OEM willing to ship a duel boot system?

When there were no takers for a free way to have your hardware stand out from the pack, it was hard to imagine a reason for every single OEM in a very crowded field to back away that didn't involve antitrust shenanigans.

Now that you mention it, I recall this as well.

I love how everyone blames Microsoft for what was OEMs doing a race to the bottom.

OEMs had an option, yes they would had to pay more for licenses, but no one pointed them a gun, or did visits mafia style to forbid them to sell other systems.

Microsoft, the incumbent, offered OEMs cheaper Windows licenses as long as there was no dual boot, or a windows license was paid for every machine sold regardless of what it ran.

Under these terms, it was suicide for OEMs to offer anything except “only Windows”. I was actually working for another company whose software was killed by Microsoft by a similar “or else” threat from Microsoft at the time.

Microsoft was a bully doing (likely) illegal things, except the FTC wasn’t doing its job.

And what would have stopped OEMs to offer the same device with a different SKU with BeOS AND Windows for say x USD more?

(kind of like Dell does with their Linux lappies)

More SKUs cost more in manufacturing, QA; choice paralysis may drive away customers. All for a relatively niche offering that might piss off their big product. Little upside. It's even a bit surprising Dell sells Linux laptops, considering.

Lack of demand (for BeOS at an extra cost; or for Windows by people who wanted BeOS)

Also, some of the time Microsoft simply forbade dual booting as a condition for OEM licensing.

It'd be business suicide to charge more just so they could offer an obscure OS as an option; in my mind, this is the kind of clear anticompetitive situation it'd be good to use the law to avoid. Instead the DOJ went after MS for bundling a web browser. So dumb.

Microsoft was sued, and settled for $23M. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-liv...

Hey, that’s neat, but too little too late!

Was it just a strategic misstep for Be to not sue at the time, when it would have mattered? Why did the DOJ care about MS bundling a web browser w/ its OS but not care about MS preventing OEMs from selling any other OS than Windows? The seems wildly, clearly more anticompetitive to me!

And why does no one care about this stuff anymore? Not only does iOS bundle a browser, you cannot install any other browser (you can install alternative UI frontends for webkit, but you can’t ship your own js/html etc engine). Not too mention that they can veto any software on the platform for any reason...

There are laws about dumping prices, beyond that it is business as usual.

Only slightly off topic, but are you aware of

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Japan-make-their-own-brand-O...

?