It had good multi-threading and good I/O scheduling (the thing most OSes neglect only to "discover" that one low-priority process can flood the I/O subsystem, g

It had good multi-threading and good I/O scheduling (the thing most OSes neglect only to "discover" that one low-priority process can flood the I/O subsystem, grinding everything to a halt). The GUI toolkit was multi-threaded; the only other one I know of is Win32 but hardly anyone takes advantage of it. Less awesomely it used a C++ API which had huge fragile-base-class problems. They tried to do the custom hardware thing and it went just about as well as NeXT, Amiga, etc. It was probably too late for Be to make it the day they started but by the time the ported to x86 it was already over. We only have two historical examples but they both follow the same overall trend: Windows ate the desktop, Mac hoarded the scraps, everyone else died. Mobile repeated the pattern: iOS eats the profits, Android eats almost everything else, and there is no room in the ecosystem for a significant third competitor. At this point it's the technology equivalent of a gravity problem... there is room for two but anyone else gets ejected from the system.