It's not a good idea to use an experimental OS in a business setting.

Maybe when it's polished an somewhat audited.

Also, it has very limited GPU/Hardware support.

OSnews was wonderful. I didn’t realize, but Eugenia posted after a 10 year hiatus back in July.

The early 2000s really took a toll on alternative commercial OS offerings. OS/2, QNX (on the desktop), BeOS, and others made that time interesting. There were even a lot of mobile OS options (Palm, early Linux handhelds, Symbian, Windows PocketPC/Mobile).

BeOS was always my favorite though. It’s amazing what Haiku has done, but sad that BeOS was shelved 20 years ago.

BeOS could have been OS X :)

Doubtful. I'm a BeOS fan, and used BeOS Pro v5 as a daily driver around 2000. Even Jean-Louis Gassée thinks (in hindsight) it would've been a bad idea [0].

If Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT, they would've have gotten Steve Jobs, who (arguably) saved Apple from bankrupcy, plus i{Mac,Pod,Phone}

At the time (1995-96?) BeOS was a (cool) tech demo, but wasn't a viable product. It had no developers and no apps. NeXT was mature. BeOS also didn't have critical things like - the ability to print, colour management, multi-user support, etc.. Apple could've added these to BeOS, but...

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-...

Final Scratch Pro was originally written for BeOS.

As a BeOS user (and wannabe dev) in 1997/98, there were plenty of software developers and applictions available,

Tunetracker Systems[0] uses Haiku for its Radio Automation software; the used to use BeOS.

[0] http://tunetrackersystems.com/

https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/haiku/index.html