This would've been quite a different world in terms of design and technology. Eventually some company, Google comes to mind in particular, would have invented

This would've been quite a different world in terms of design and technology. Eventually some company, Google comes to mind in particular, would have invented a device similar to, but not as well-designed as the iPhone. The development might just not have been that momentous and perhaps technology would have developed in an entirely different direction because of that. Perhaps - due to a lack of an App Store business model - we even would have had a continuous boom of the web and more open technologies on mobile devices rather than the lull web technologies experienced on mobile devices until fairly recently. Who knows? BeOS was very much a desktop OS. Like other operating systems such as AmigaOS it performed very well on some stripped-down desktop platforms such as set-top boxes, too (those were all the rage back in the 90s, at least some companies bet the whole farm on that assumption ...). I'm not sure if BeOS would've lent itself to mobile devices as well as NeXTSTEP did. NeXTSTEP was a forward-looking, POSIX-compatible OS that was ahead of its time. Most importantly though, Be Inc. didn't have Steve Jobs. They had Jean-Louis Gassée but I somehow doubt he would've had a similar influence on design, technology and the business world. Someone once quipped that NeXT bought Apple for -$400 million. There's something very true about that statement.