March '98 Be Developers' Conference Developer Relations Frank Boosman and Christophe Droulers

Mr. Paterson: Welcome to day two of the Be Developer Conference. Today we're going to have a shorter general session, a one-hour general session, and then we will go right into the first technical sessions, and then at 12 o'clock we'll break again for lunch and then resume these technical sessions again at 1 o'clock.

After the sessions at 5 o'clock today we're going to have the presentation of the Master's Awards, so stick around for that, and then after that we'll do our traditional Be Team Q and A where we'll get all of the Be engineers, all of the Developer Relations people, even the Marketing people are going to be up here, and you can ask us any questions that you like. And we may answer them, too.

One thing, I'm going to begin the general session by introducing Frank Boosman, and many of you may not know him because he's a recent addition to Be. He was the Vice President of Product Development at Red Storm Entertainment and before that he was at Virtus, where he was VP and General Manager, and even before that he was a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe. That's all kind of nice background. I don't really consider that the most important stuff.

What's the most important thing really is that he is Vice President of Developer Relations of Be, that's the Evangelism group, Developer Programs, and I think arguably that he has the single hardest job at Be. He's responsible for bringing applications, along with you. He's responsible for convincing you to bring applications to the BeOS, which is our single most important goal of coming here. It's our single hardest hurdle that we have to clear to make this a successful operating system.

So without any more delay, Frank Boosman, VP of Developer Relations.

Mr. Boosman: Thank you, Scott, for that wonderful introduction. By the way, we watched Scott play at Tetris the other night when we were getting ready, and I think that Scott said that he was a championship Tetris player and would be happy to play people for money; was that right, Scott? Did I get that wrong?

Thank you very much for being here for the second day of the conference and for the conference as a whole. On behalf of Be it's hard to say how pleased and proud and honored we are that you've taken time out to come here and be with us for a couple of days. We know how busy all of you are. We know how much work it is to get products to market, and it makes us feel great that you've chosen to spend some of your valuable time with us.

Just real quickly, a show of hands: How many people here thought that day one of the conference did not suck? Great. Thank you. Thank you. That's great.

As our esteemed VP of Sales and Marketing, Alex Osadziski, would say, we don't like things that suck. So I will count that as a successful first day.

Speaking of Alex, my cellular phone is turned off because Alex would think it was a really good jape to call me during the session and see if I would answer my phone. Nice try.

Okay. So I can spend a minute telling you about my background in some more detail, or I could tell you... a Jean-Louis story. What do you want?

All: Jean-Louis.

Mr. Boosman: All right. So how was it that Scott referred to it yesterday, the "open and frank discussions at lunch?" So I've been here for a couple of weeks at Be enjoying these "open and frank discussions" (dirty jokes), and thinking that at some point I had to jump in. I had to say something. I had to come up with something, but they just kept getting more and more "open and frank." So I finally thought I've just got to go for it. I've got to go right to the edge.

So I was in the coffee bar with Jean-Louis one day and said, Jean-Louis, I have the worst joke. And by the way, there is no way in hell I'm going to tell this joke at this conference, so don't ask. The most offensive joke I know. All right. So I started to tell it to him. And this is the kind of joke that can offend everyone in a room, and on multiple levels with the worst kind of offense.

About halfway through as I was telling it I thought to myself, "I've only been here a couple of weeks. What the hell am I doing? I like my job!" But it's too late at that point to stop. So I kept going.

I finished the joke and kind of nervously waited for his reaction. And believe me, this is the worst joke you've ever heard. He thought for a moment, and he said, "That's sweet." So -- all right. Thank you.

So, Christophe, if you would do the honors, here. What I'd like to do is talk first about our philosophy of evangelism. This is very much a living set of laws. I'm sure that if you come to our subsequent developer conferences, these will be slightly different, but this should give you a good feel of how we want to relate to you and how we try to work with you.

The first thing that I would tell you if you'd go to the next line, and this is maybe the most important thing, is that we believe that developers know best. You know your products; you know your markets; you know your technologies; you know your customers better than we do. We would never pretend otherwise.

In a previous life I went up to an operating system company to demonstrate my company's new 3-D rendering and visualization product to the advanced technology group there, and after giving a demonstration of it, the leader of the advanced technology group kind of thought for a moment and said, "Well, what's the point of this, anyway?" We will never say that to you.

That's worse than having somebody tell you that your product sucks. At least then they understand what it's for. So we will never do that to you. We know that you know best, and we will always respect that.

Second, and this is going to sound very, very strange coming from a person who's essentially the lead Evangelist at Be, we believe in giving information and not sermons. Our point is not to proselytize you as much as it is to let you know what we're doing.

If we give you accurate information about what we're doing technically and from a marketing standpoint, then you will make the best possible decision for your business. That's what we're going to try to do when our Evangelists spend time with you in the field. We're going to give you the best possible information that we can and let you assimilate that.

Third, great developers make great Evangelists and they make great Support Engineers and great Program Managers. So we hire people as a general rule who have been in your exact position, because we believe that they have the best ability to empathize with you and to understand the issues that you face.

So let me just take a moment and introduce the people that I'm fortunate enough to have in my group working for me in evangelism.

We have Dave Johnson. Dave is currently both our audio and productivity tools and developer tools evangelist, which makes him a very busy guy. We have a new evangelist, Tim Self, who is starting in a couple of weeks but couldn't be here this morning. Tim should be here at the conference later this afternoon.

If you're thinking about an audio application, you should talk with Tim, or if you're in development tools, you should have a close, personal relationship with Dave. Andrew Kimpton. Andrew is our imaging evangelist or as Andrew likes to call it...

Mr. Kimpton: Flat media.

Mr. Boosman: So any kind of imaging, processing application, painting, that sort of thing, you should get to know Andrew very well.

Scott Patterson? Scott, our master of ceremonies, is not only our Product Marketing Manager but is our Evangelist for video applications. So if you're in the video space, get to know Scott and get to know him well.

On the Developer Technical Support side, we have a great team. I'll start with Stephen Beaulieu. Stephen. And Brian Mikol. And Doug Wright. These are the people that answer your questions when you call, when you write to us. I think they're an outstanding team of people. I think everybody got a little demonstration of that shortly before this conference when we found a small glitch in R3 CDs that we sent out. Of their own volition they got on the phone and tried to call every single person that got those. So thanks, guys. That was an awesome effort.

And last but absolutely not least, we have Valerie Peyre, who is our developer programs manager. Valerie is also more than any other single person responsible for this conference.

The fourth thing that I'll tell you is that we believe, and this is almost a mantra at Be, is that customers buy solutions. We don't for a moment deceive ourselves into believing that they buy OSes. OSes without applications, without great software are valueless.

So what we're trying to do now in our group is to work with you and with other people in the world to provide complete solutions to customer problems. Customers have problems, they look for solutions, they will buy those solutions and I'll touch on this a little bit more later, but that really is our focus here.

Again, you'll hear us talk about complete solutions a lot. So let me talk about from the general to the specific. How can we help you? Well, there are a number of things that we can do to help you with your product efforts.

The first is, you should be in

It's a comprehensive web site. We're going to be working over the coming months to not only improve that, not only to update it, but to enhance it in a variety of ways.

Next is developer support. We've talked about that. They are there for you. We encourage you to use them. If you need them to submit reports, we want to know what you're experiencing with the OS. If we don't know you're having a problem, we can't help you.

Finally, we have co-marketing support. We can sit down with you on a one-on-one basis and tell you what we're doing, not only what our technical plans are, but what our marketing and distribution plans are. We can maybe make you aware of options that you didn't know about before.

We do a variety of things all to help you get those products to market because that's our job, and it doesn't stop once we've convinced you that the BeOS is the right OS to develop for. It goes all the way to ship and afterwards.

So that's a brief bit about how Be in the United States can help you.

Christophe Droulers, who is our director of developer relations for Europe, is going to take a few minutes and talk to you about how Be in Europe can help you and why you should be thinking about Europe.

I'll come back up and close out the session with a few more slides and we'll move on to the next demo. So, Christophe?

Mr. Droulers: Thank you, Frank. I probably should start with something like guten morgen, bon jour. Hey, how many Europeans are in the room right now? Thank you for being here anyway. I'd like to spend the five, ten minutes speaking more about what is Be Europe and what we could do for your developers coming to Europe.

First I'd like to introduce you to most of the European team we have here. We are missing the most important part with the VP of Europe, John Calmon, who is keeping the shop open right now. He might be sleeping right now.

But let me introduce you to first Marie-Claude who is our administrative assistant in Europe. And Thijs Stalenhoef. I am still trying to keep improving his name, but Thijs is taking --

Mr. Stalenhoef: He's doing better every day.

Mr. Droulers: Thijs is taking care of developer support in Europe, and is also the web master, and I'll invite you to visit the web site. He has redone a few days of it.

So maybe some of you don't know about the Be. I wanted to speak very quickly on the part of Be Europe. Be Europe started in 1994, and the purpose was helping Jean-Louis gathering some investors from Europe, and fundraising started in Europe in 1994. Then in '95 we started -- I started. I joined the Be Europe subsidiary and started some evangelism in Europe.

We traveled a lot in Europe finding developers and evangelizing the BeOS, and we started also the first web site in August -- it was more private. I mean the web site. And we even had the first BeDC, meaning Paris. Jean-Louis was there and there were 15 developers in the room. I'm pretty happy to see that we're getting more and more developers every day.

But that was -- I mean, probably some of you Europeans were there. It was fun, you know. Something like 15 people, average age was 25, and with something like twelve years of experience in programming. Interesting meeting.

Then in '96 we went more on the events, the subsidiary was created, and we went in many countries. Finland, Sweden, we went at the Comdex and the Apple Expos, the equivalent of the micro here in the U.S., and then '97.

In '97 was more exhibition. We had more relations with the developers. We had several BeDCs in Europe, and we also created what we call the Geek Teas, which is a mostly open doors to developers. They can come and show their product, share source code. I don't know why they are called geek-tese in France. They should be called geek red wine or geek champagne, whatever.

And we also had a lot of investment in the press, and we probably distributed something like 350,000 PR-1CDs inserted in magazines, European magazines. Well, that's about all the history.

While I am speaking now, there is a huge event in Germany called the CeBit. Maybe you probably know about the CeBit, and it's incredible. Sebbitt is 700,000 visitors. And that's huge. Something like the CeBit booth, the size of the Micro World Expo. So we'll be there, anyway, and especially noticed.

So where are we now? We are over 1300 developers right now in France. I mean in Europe. We've got some probably famous names already you met in the Be desktop mailing list: Chris Maxbower, Thijs Stalenhoef. I'm sorry, guys, I can't say all the names already. 27 different countries.

Let me explain to you what Europe is for Be. Europe starts in Islam and ends at -- goes from the North Pole to South Africa. So that's probably the most challenging part we have to deal with within Europe. I wouldn't call that Europe. Extended Europe. So to include the Middle East and the African countries.

We set up the customer support in Brussels. They can answer any question officially in French, German, English, Dutch and Spanish, but they know more languages. And I'll come back on that later on, because they can be helpful to you also.

We've got the new web site, and I would take that opportunity to look at our web site. Is Hans in the room here? No? Hans Speir? Hans, I'm surprised he's not here, because Hans Speir is responsible, and thanks to Thijs because he was previously heading that, the Be Leading Edge web site.

Who has been visiting the Be Leading Edge web site? You probably know that if you want to know anything regarding Be, Be Europe, even the BeDC, because they have done a tremendous job during the night probably, everything regarding yesterday's session is on Be Leading Edge.

I would like to thank those guys working very hard on getting news about Be and the BeOS. And four people right now in the Be Europe subsidiary, but we'll have more and more people. The first one is almost coming in. We might be something like seven to ten people by the end of the year. Thank you, Frank.

So why Be Europe? And let me summarize that very quickly and to make it clear why we are in Europe. We are in Europe with two objectives, two goals.

First one, the first one is the distribution, of course, and customer support for the BeOS. We set up the customer support in Brussels, but, you know, 27 countries, you can deal with 27 countries and more if we take the whole European area.

So we want to concentrate on major, major countries first like Germany, UK, France, of course, Scandinavian countries, and we'll go in the following months more in other countries.

Of course, we want to do also BeOS, the distribution channels. Internet and the StarCode guys, later on during this presentation is one way to get software on both sides of the Atlantic, but you'll probably know that the Internet is a little bit late in some countries in Europe. So we need also to set up real distribution channels, with local distributor.

Each country have their own rules and habits, and that might be a little bit difficult from you guys from the U.S., accessing the European market.

And, of course, localization. We do have already the users guide in French, if you want to read it. No problem. We have some of them here, and we have planned to have other localized manuals in several languages, and that's about all you should have while accessing the European market.

The second goal for the European subsidiary is evangelism and developer support also. And that's very important. I'm taking care of that for the past four years now, and, of course, we want more developers.

So those are open and anybody can register and come over and be a Be developer. But what also we want, and that's what Frank mentioned, we do want to make some co-marketing with you guys in Europe. So that means promote your software and distribute your software in Europe. That could be through exhibitions, distribution channels, putting you in contact with people over there. It could be also localization or press conference.

Let's be practical. How we can help? Probably the first one is link developers together. You know, developers know best, not only regarding the market they are targeting at, but also they probably know best the technical issue they are working on so if anybody is asking X.25 technical questions, we might not have the answer, I mean internally, but we might know other developers working on the same problem and link the developers together. Mainly this is one way of doing that. Geek-tese is probably another way. I mean meeting developers together. But we will try to improve that on both sides of the Atlantic with the Internet and can work together.

We can provide people to help. You might need some developers. You probably have seen the advertisement in one of the last newsletters regarding graphic drivers. You might have seen also a company is looking for some programmers.

California used to be a sunny place. Belgians or Scandinavians would love to come over and work with you guys in California.

I like also to give a team for you and Europeans and visit the Trident Op Net web site and meet with Charles Evans. Charles, are you here? And Charles Evans is really investigating how we could make a two-way bridge between U.S. and Europe to help you setting up a company somewhere, or finding people, linking developers together. So I invite you to talk with Charles right after the meeting here, the presentation.

Support Be developers locally. We can support you technically, even if -- the U.S. team is very useful. We need them anyway, but it's more a marketing way of supporting you in Europe. We will want also having you participate in European shows and events. Be our guest during international events in Europe.

If you want to show your product there and we had already some U.S. companies, go with other nations coming over to Europe, I promise you being at the Sebbitt with 700,000 visitors, that makes your product really well known.

You have other events like that. So be our guest. If you want to participate in specific events in Europe. We won't be at all the events, but if you are working on a sound application and you want to be at that Music Messer, for example, in Frankfurt, it was last week, tell us about it. We can help you setting up a booth, and having the Be presence at the same time if you want Be there.

Probably the last point. The more obscure for you, is translation. I invite you to go to the session Hiroshi Lockheimer will do this afternoon regarding localization issues and everything, but we do have local translators in Europe, so if you are looking to translate your software in Polish, Russian or whatever, send us a mail. We can help you in that setup.

And distribution, of course. Distribution is probably finding local distributors. Just to let you know, we have the famous distributor who is also a Be shareholder, so we could help you on that.

Distribution, press. You know, people from the press are very avid of having info about your products. And they want to write about it. We've got magazine, with regular monthly pages talking about the BeOS, I mean in Swedish, Italian, and they are looking for info about your products. So don't hesitate to send me a mail if you want to -- I mean, have your product more known in Europe.

Of course, customer support, I told you about the Zeitel, the company who is doing customer support in Brussels in Europe. That company knows about the BeOS. They can answer technical questions to the BeOS. They are playing with your BeWare. They know your application probably already, and if you want to have a local customer support base in Europe, they are ready to help you on that. I can put you in contact with those guys.

In one phrase, get your product in Europe, and get the European side of your product already inside, I mean your application right now.

So in conclusion, I would repeat what we didn't agree on that, but yesterday Claude L'Eglise told you about the market in the world, and you probably know now that any software company well known and installed has something like 30 percent of its market is in Europe. So that's quite a bit. Probably U.S. is 40. Europe is 30, and rest of the world would be 30. Japanese also a good place to be. So don't forget Europe.

We can help you on that, and we could also create a two-way bridge, distributing your product in Europe, but also I think any U.S. contact so European developers could distribute the product. If you have any idea on that, please contact me. If you want to contact us, we have some addresses, e-mail addresses there. Probably the easiest one to remember is the marketing at BeEurope.com.

Anyway, we can handle any e-mail addresses, and to finish that presentation, I would say that Be has invested quite a lot of money in Europe, and we indeed at Be think that BeEurope might be part of the -- of your success and key to your success, but we can do that only if we work together.

So I would say, bienvenue in Europe, or welcome in Europe, and feel free to ask any questions. Feel free to ask any questions. Thanks for your attention.

Mr. Boosman: Thank you, Christophe.

So a couple of basic points I want to make while we're here in this session. The first I wanted to talk about is the opportunity that we have together to rewrite the rules. By rewriting the rules, what I mean is, we have the BeOS represents a new platform. It is a fresh start, and it is the chance to do things differently. Not just to do them differently, but because we can do them better. And the reason to do so boils down to some degree because we can.

We have the opportunity, and just because we have certain business models that exist from the software market over the last ten years doesn't mean we always need to migrate those. What we want to do is take the best of what we know in terms of marketing and distribution and ditch the rest and come up with a much better model for all of us.

In terms of who does the rewriting, we were talking about the rules of how we bring products to market. It's all of us. It's not just Be, and it's not just you. It's us together innovating. Every time one of you uses a different pricing model than has been used in the past or uses a new innovative distribution model, you're helping to rewrite the rules, and making the model better for all of us together.

In terms of which rules do we rewrite, I think that everything is on the table. We don't know yet precisely what the model will look like, in a year or two, for how software will be marketed and distributed for the BeOS. If we did, I'd be happy to tell you. I think that's something that's going to evolve in a very Darwinian sort of process. But everything is on the table and should be.

Now, what we wanted to do at this point was to do a demo of some software from StarCode, the makers of Software Valet and BeDepot and Package Builder. Unfortunately, unless there's been an update, our network is down, their network connection back to their office, and we can't do that right now so what we're going to try to do is get that up this afternoon, and during Dave Johnson's talk at 4:00 p.m., which is Approaching the Market, we'll have a brief demo of their software, but essentially what it allows you to do is it makes it insanely simple to bring your products to market through electronic software distribution. It makes it less expensive and less effort on your part, and what we think that will do is make possible commercial apps that weren't possible before today unless you're a publisher on your own.

You have two options to get money from your software. One is to find a publisher, and the other is to go with some sort of shareware-like approach.

What StarCode has the ability to do is to allow you very simply to take applications from applets to major applications to market at very little effort and at lower cost.

For example, what that could mean to you is it could mean you could bring down your unit price while still making just as much or more money as you were before thereby increasing your unit sales and making more money in the long run.

So again, you should come to Dave Johnson's talk at 4 o'clock, both because he has a lot of things to say, and also because you should see the demo.

So do you remember the part where I said that our goal is to provide you information and not evangelism? It's not to proselytize? Forget all that. I'm going to proselytize now. You should develop for BeOS. So let me tell you why very briefly.

First of all, if we're not doing a good job of why BeOS is representing better technology, we should all be taken out and shot at this point. It's better technology that allows you to do things in software that couldn't be done before in software alone on desktop machines, like professional and near professional video editing effects in real time. All in software. Or manipulating 2,000 data points at 60 Hertz all in software without additional hardware. We think that's compelling enough technology that will allow you to build brand new applications that simply weren't possible on off-the-shelf desktop machines before.

Second, we have a very focused market. As Jean-Louis said, we aren't trying to be a better DOS than DOS, or a better Windows than Windows. What we're trying to do is go after people who want to manipulate real-time media, video and audio and other media, that today's computers and today's operating systems simply aren't well set up to handle. We think that's a very focused market of just a few million people that we can grab a significant chunk of, and focus all of our energies there, which means that you don't have to do scatter shop marketing. You won't be taking out dual page ads in PC World at 40 or 50 K a pop. You'll know exactly who your customers are. We'll do everything we possibly can to help you reach them. They are a very focused tight group of people who will have money to spend in this application space.

Higher margins. Those are music to developers' and publishers' ears. By bringing down the cost of distribution, by focusing on electronic distribution and by bringing down the cost of marketing, by moving away from this "let's spray ads at everyone and hope that we reach our target customers" approach, we can help you raise your margins, make your products more profitable.

It's our strong belief that we as a company and you as developers can be very, very nicely profitable with what the market would consider to be a fairly small subset of people, just a few percent, but because they're so focused, and because we have a different business model, we can all make a lot of money even at that market size.

Finally, there is the green fields effect. There is no entrenched competition on the BeOS. You have a fresh chance to go after customers, and the best technology, best market, best distribution will win. There is no one who will just stomp you instantly because they have an entrenched position that you don't. And as Steve Sakoman said yesterday, we're on track for R4 in September of this year. That's six months away.

So we have six months working together on our side to get R4 shipping and to make it everything that it needs to be successful in the consumer marketplace. That gives you six months to get your applications ready. We would love to have you with us when we ship R4. Thank you.

We should have a few minutes left. So Christophe and I and actually the entire developer relations staff would be happy to answer any questions.

A Speaker: From my experience with working with different platforms, it seems like in Europe there is not the entrenchment of Windows, say, as an operating system as it is in the U.S. Is that true? There are a lot of people using Ataris. It seems like a more open mind as far as what machine and platform to use.

Mr. Droulers: The question regarding European market and the way they see different platforms, the Ataris, as you say, that's -- I'm very sure it's true. The proof of it is regarding the German market. Actually probably Germany is -- I mean it's not probably. It's sure. Germany is probably the first market in Europe right now, and, you know, why not? As probably the media, and the media market so many millions of Ataris sold in Germany. And, you know, those applications are, I would say, without any father and mother, and they are looking for an OS, and they see in the BeOS. What they used to use. But you're right. Atari, I think it's a million point five Atari sold for music only in Germany. So you're right. They are pretty open to the BeOS, especially in Germany.

Mr. Boosman: Other questions? Yes.

A Speaker: The question I had is a little off of the topic, but perhaps I can get an answer. I was wondering last year we got an announcement about Netscape on the BeOS. What seems to be going on with it?

Mr. Boosman: I can take that, or is Alex in the room? The question was about the status of Netscape on the BeOS. I'm trying to think of the best way to answer that question. Do any of my evangelists want to take that one on? Andrew?

Mr. Kimpton: A lot of development has happened with Netscape in particular. A lot of development has happened with Netscape over the last year or so, and they have progressed quite well technically with understanding the BeOS, and developing a server based product.

Netscape itself, however, as a company has changed some of its base strategy, and there was some optimism from us at Be that the team that had developed the technology and the understanding of the BeOS after dealing with the server and completing that work would move on to doing a browser, which actually is one of the most probably key technology pieces that they have that everybody wants to know about.

In the last few months, as probably all of you are aware, Netscape has decided they would make that source code for their browser products available or in some manner available over the next month or so, and there are a number of people, I'm one in particular, who are now members of the Be developer community who are intrigued and interested in trying to lead forward an effort to try and take that source and import it.

I neglect to remember, unfortunately, the actual individual who used to be involved and work at Netscape himself. If he's in the room, he could wave his hand. He is here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Do you just want to stand up just a little? I can embarass you much further. Can you say your name?

Mr. Hess: Richard Hess.

Mr. Kimpton: Richard is a registered Be developer. He has a request going out, and I think it's been featured on Be Leading Edge recently, to speak with other people in taking that source when it's available, so I'm sure he'll be prowling the halls this afternoon.

We have yet to see exactly what that Netscape arrangement is, what source they do give and what licensing arrangement they give to it and what that all means. We are continuing to encourage them to make that server product available.

I don't know if Ficus is in the room. I don't think he's here this morning. We have one of our engineers who was very closely involved in that effort at Netscape, and he's a good source to continue to try to encourage them to make it available. Their issue revolves around support, unfortunately, but hopefully we'll see that technology see the light of day in the next few months.

Mr. Boosman: Any other questions?

Mr. Droulers: I'll take just one minute because I see Hans Speir. He was probably updating the Be Leading Edge web site. If you have any rumor to post on the Be Leading Edge, you should tell that rumor to Hans Speir, and again, thank you for your work, Hans. Any questions?

Mr. Boosman: Okay. So our next session begins in ten minutes. Thank you very much.