Nothing but BeOS and money.

I should have mentioned this last week, but it would have kind of gotten lost among rest of what ultimately ended up looking like a geek's autobiography.

My search for the perfect OS did, at one point, bring me to investigate BeOS, a product of Be, Inc. (which is now slowly digesting in the belly of Palm). At the time, BeOS was a fine offering, capable of beating the pants off of Windows as a media OS, but Be never did quite the right things to grab the attention of the general public. A shame, really.

So BeOS really does have more than a few applications that have been written for it. BeBits is a nice little collection of BeOS software. But what you see there is pretty much the extent of what's available. Third parties didn't exactly jump on the BeOS bandwagon, and that prevented users from adopting it, and low user adoption prevented third parties from developing for it, and... yeah. We've seen this cycle before.

I still find it more than a little sad that BeOS is doomed to end up in the same "superior yet never adopted technology" bucket as Betamax and Minidiscs. Hm. Sony might as well have purchased Be, Inc. on principle alone.