Palm Computing Bought Be, Inc. for $11 million

this week. Both companies were founded by former Apple employees. When then-CEO Gil Amelio was looking to buy a successor to the venerable Mac OS instead of completing the Copland project, the BeOS was almost it. However, Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassee proved to be too greedy by trying to squeeze $75 million more than the $200 million that Apple was willing to pay. Actually, Amelio thought $125 million was too much. Amelio then decided on the NeXT OS for $400+ million and Steve Jobs as a consultant paving the way for his ouster and Mac OS X as a Unix-based OS.

The BeOS was (is) a terrific OS with a small footprint. It's incredibly fast on a PowerPC CPU with multithreading and protected memory. It is probably the best OS that we have ever used. The only major issue was that it required a whole new set of applications making adopting it as the Mac OS' successor a very risky move. At the time, early in 1997, Apple announced that purchasing the NeXT OS would lead to a faster next Mac OS than the BeOS. Here we are over 4 years later and still waiting for a complete Mac OS X with Mac OS X native applications.