I do not remember BeOS lacking networking, it may have lacked TCP/IP at one point, but so did MacOS at the time, you had to get it and a PPP app via a third party application. My memory could be failing me on this one, but I don't seem to recall not having networking in BeOS. My point though was not to compare BeOS to now, but BeOS to the Mac OS that was shipping in which case, besides for a few items and apps, BeOS was ready and would have been a huge improvement with little investment in development. They would have needed to provide a virtulization environment for the old OS, printing support as well as a few other odds and ends. Remember most OS's of the time where not multiuser, security was not at the forefront and most where on dial-up. Comparing what OSX became to what they where trying to accomplish at the time is a little bit of apples and oranges. They where touting shared memory and symmetric multiprocessing. It was still at that basic of a level that the old MacOS was so far behind on. To many observers BeOS fit the bill perfectly and would have had the users on a modern OS in short order. In the end they made the better choice but many, I would dare to say most of us just did not see the logic at the time.