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By 1999 it was too late. They'd already transitioned to x86 and that was their death knell. At the time most hardware would provide drivers only for Windows whi
by jghn 9y ago
By 1999 it was too late. They'd already transitioned to x86 and that was their death knell. At the time most hardware would provide drivers only for Windows which meant that other OSs needed to create their own.
This sorta-kinda worked for things like Linux where the masses would crowdsource them, but for a commercial OS like BeOS they had to spend a ton of time working on this instead of the actual OS.
My recollection at the time was as soon as they entered into this phase the forward progress on BeOS itself ground to a halt, and within a few years the mainstream OSs had started to at least pay lip service to its key features. Any momentum they had was completely lost.
- walrus01 9y agoBy late 1999 it was also too late because Microsoft had taken NT4.0 Workstation, put a much better GUI on it and made it even more stable and reliable, and released it as Windows 2000. It was pretty regular to see Windows 2000 workstation machines with uptimes of 25+ days, which was unheard of in the consumer Win95/Win98/Win98SE era. You could actually kill a misbehaving application and not risk crashing the whole OS.
- tarsinge 9y agoI remember my Windows 2000 Pentium III was a joy to use (despite being an heavy Mac user), so much that I never upgraded it to Windows XP.
- linguae 9y agoI concur. In my opinion, Windows 2000 was the best version of Windows. It had a very clean interface, and it was a very stable operating system. It also lacked the annoyances of later versions of Windows, such as activation, mandatory updates, and telemetry. It was everything I ever wanted from an operating system, and honestly, even though I'm a Mac user, I'd use an updated version of Windows 2000 if Microsoft ever decides to make one. I've been keeping an eye on the ReactOS project for this reason.
- pjmlp 9y agoLinux would have been dead by now if companies did not saw in it the opportunity to avoid paying for UNIX licenses. Or in the case of UNIX vendors, outsource their development costs.