BYTE.com > The Be View > 2000 > October
It Takes More Than Tech
By Scott Hacker
October 31, 2000
(A BeOS View Of Apple's New OS X
: Page 4 of 4 )
There's more to OS success than great technology. It's about two things, folks: Great marketing and great solutions.
Neither Be nor its partners have ever succeeded in getting a noteworthy marketing campaign off the ground. Beyond the trade show circuit and the Free BeOS campaign, scarcely a dime has been spent on getting BeOS under the noses of the masses -- a fact I can't meditate on for more than 30 seconds without breaking out in hives.
Without marketing, solutions compelling enough to generate millions of new BeOS users have -- for the most part -- failed to emerge. As things stand, BeOS is the most pleasant operating environment I know of. But it just doesn't offer the array of compelling solutions it needs to be taken seriously by major market segments.
All of that is behind us now; the time has passed and Be is primarily an appliance OS vendor working directly with OEMs rather than end users. BeOS itself is still being actively worked on by Be, and third-party applications continue to appear. But there's no question that OS X will emerge onto the market with a large base of apps mature enough for use in professional settings, and that it will continue to enjoy a momentum greater than BeOS has mustered over the past five years.
While Apple's OS X will be attractive to geeks like me, it will also come with great marketing and great solutions. Viewed in light of their similarities, OS X could well become the BeOS that never was. While BeOS users struggle to support developers and/or convince companies to port their products, dozens of big-name development houses have already signed on to bring their products to OS X. Apple will likely advertise OS X as broadly as they do their hardware. Windows and Linux users will no longer be able to look down their noses at MacOS, and may even change horses in countable numbers. From where I sit, things look very good for OS X.
Do I find OS X personally interesting? Damn right I do. Could I conceivably be seduced away from BeOS? Quite possibly.
BYTE.com > The Be View > 2000 > October
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