The multi-threading was probably part of the reason. SMP was quickly becoming more and more common place with even Power Macs having a second processor despite

The multi-threading was probably part of the reason. SMP was quickly becoming more and more common place with even Power Macs having a second processor despite Mac OS 9 and it’s predecessors not supporting SMP (applications had to specifically be written to support it). Likewise on Intel, you had Windows 9x that didn’t support SMP so you were stuck with the NT line if you wanted multi processor support. I recall NT4 being pretty poor for desktop usage due to patchy driver support but Windows 2000 was amazing. Linux and BSD weren’t really desktop ready either. So BeOS was basically a workstation class operating system designed to be running on lower footprint hardware (the comparison someone else made to Amiga is pretty apt). As much as I typically hate Windows and prefer Linux and FreeBSD, Windows 2000 was pretty solid release and particularly when you place it in its era where only BeOS really competed with it in terms of performance and stability on commodity hardware.