BeOS 4.5: Nice but Niche

Latest release holds promise for multimedia apps but still needs work.

The road to fame has been bumpy for Be, Inc. After a disappointing Release 4 of its BeOS operating system, the company had to abandon a 4.1 upgrade partly because Apple gave it the cold shoulder. Without Apple's cooperation, Be was forced to drop development efforts for the PowerPC G3 processor and shift to the Intel x86 platform instead.

The result is BeOS Release 4.5, a $99.95 ($69.95 introductory) package that gives you a 32-bit, rock-solid modern operating system with smooth multitasking, networking, and multimedia support.

It's affordable and powerful, but BeOS is still a niche operating system aimed at the multimedia-centric. Meager hardware support and a lack of compatible popular applications are confining the appeal of BeOS to the already converted rather than drawing in migrants from other OS platforms.

Jean-Louis Gassée, chief executive officer of Be, says it would be "suicidal" to take on Microsoft in the operating system battlefield. Instead, Gassée's survival strategy is based on coexistence. Accordingly, BeOS 4.5 installs happily on machines already running Windows 9x, NT and Linux. The idea is that whenever users want to do multimedia work, they should boot into BeOS.

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