Be, Inc. Posted a Good Bye Letter

on its web site. Be, Inc., developer of the Be OS, was sold for $11 million to Palm back in November. The site also contains a notice of the January 16, 2002, public liquidation auction with details to come later. The Be OS almost became Apple's new OS for $200 million, less than half of what Steve Jobs negotiated for the NeXT OS., but Be's management proved too greedy and upped its purchase price to $250 million killing the deal according to the first hand account of Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO of that time. We tried out all the Mac betas and thought that the Be OS would be a terrific choice for the new Mac OS. The Be OS is elegantly small and incredibly fast on Apple's PowerPC CPU plus it has multitasking and protected memory. The Be OS was ported to Intel chips and we still run it on our Compaq Presario. What will Palm do with it? Replace the Palm OS which is under patent infringement litigation?