Masters Awards and Q&A

Be Developers' Conference

Q&A

Scott Paterson: Okay. With that, I believe that we are going to go right into the Be team question and answer, so I'm going to invite the whole Be team to come up and fit on this stage.

Wait, change of plans.

Alex Osadziski: Before that, I get to do my favorite activity, ritual humiliation. It's the only thing that keeps me going.

The thing I wanted to do before we bring the whole Be team up here, this vast mass of people, is to thank everyone who was involved in the conference. Of course to thank the attendees for coming, all of you who spent two days of your time in sunny Santa Clara sitting here in darkened rooms. Not that dark. A little bit lighter than that. Yes. Almost as dark as this. To hear about the BeOS, to give us your feedback, it's been an interactive conference, we sincerely appreciate the time you have taken.

As you always know, you have been in lots of conferences, everyone says this at the end but it's no less valuable for that. Is... (cell phone starts ringing.)

(Applause.)

Alex Osadziski: Frank, do you know what I like about you? Nothing. All right.

Moving right along. So no less valuable, you heard it a number of times before, the tremendous amount of work that goes into conferences like this. I wanted to... and it's very dangerous because I always forget a key contributor and I'm going to do it today.

I want to thank Michael Alderete, who put together all of the slides.

(Applause.)

Andrew Kimpton, who put together all of the demo equipment, all of the staging and everything and spent many hours on that. Thank you, Andrew.

Scott Paterson for two things, one was to actually be the Emcee and be one of the people who put together the whole conference and has kind of been keeping the flow going and for not taking an easy opportunity to abuse and humiliate me.

And last but by no means least, I want to thank Sylvie Pelaprat, our marketing and PR manager. Sylvie? We have a surprise for you.

(Applause.)

Closely followed by her surprise, she can't see it. It's foliage. So thank you very much, Sylvie. Congratulations.

And I have to do something, can we turn the projector off or can you stand in front of it for a second? Oh, yes. You can't see how I do this or Pavel will kill me.

Scott Paterson: Oh.

Alex Osadziski: All right. So this is the secret about box, as you look down here this recognizes the real people who put the BeOS together; a number of different people. And one of the people who come up while I'm running this here, I didn't time this well, is the person who really has had responsibility for putting the conference together.

I'm going to take the opportunity to further humiliate this person. To give you the background of this about box, Valerie is known affectionately in Be as Valerie "snip snip" Peyre. Why is she called Valerie "snip snip" Peyre? Well, it's a long story that involves Dominic writing an article for the newsletter, being late with it, correctly opining that Valerie would in some way reduce his reproductive abilities if he didn't get it in on time. Valerie in fact sending out an e-mail to selected people unbeknownst to Dominic, who all sent it back and said that the newsletter said something about snip snip.

So we have some gifts for Valerie and I can now reveal for you it's Valerie's birthday tomorrow and she put this whole thing together, so please come on up, Valerie.

(Applause.)

Look at that. Cuts a human hair. So these are for you and a magnificent bottle of Chilean reisling. According to Mike Alderete, your favorite wine.

(Applause.)

Alex Osadziski: And if William can run to the front here, we have more foliage for you as well. Happy birthday, Valerie, and thank you for everything.

(Applause.)

With that, I'll invite up the rest of the Be team and we will answer as many of your questions as we can. Come on up folks, don't be shy.

Okay. So, I hope they are asking questions. Who would like to ask the first question? Steve will act as microphone person, he is engineering VP after all.

Be Team: No questions.

Be Team: Don't be shy.

Be Team: So how do we bring up that secret about box, anyway?

A Speaker: There is no secret BeBox.

Alex Osadziski: If we told you, it wouldn't be a secret anymore.

A Speaker: Seriously, is there any plan for Mac OS (inaudible)...

Be Team: Someone sent me a reference to where the documentation is on MacIntosh developers CD, which we have at Be. So I will take a look. It doesn't appear to be a lot of work but I haven't seen what the differences are. We will have to look at it and evaluate it for R4.

A Speaker: Can you tell us anything about OEM partners for Intel systems?

Alex Osadziski: Oh, I'm miked already. No, not yet. I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking 15 different OEMs will be shipping the BeOS bundle on the disk. We are in very late stage protracted detailed discussions with several OEMs in the U.S. and Japan. We hope to have something to announce later this year. For obvious reasons they don't want their names disclosed. It would be inappropriate until we have signed, sealed contracts. But thanks for asking.

A Speaker: Can we look forward to some sort of out of the box network file system type of stuff? I know there are NFS file client and servers...

A Speaker: What's been suggested lately is Samba for the DOS world, so we will see what happens with that.

Be Team: There is a lot of existing code that implements it. My guess is it would not be in the R4 time frame, so we don't over commit.

A Speaker: When can we expect or can we expect a Java virtual machine? Is that important for Be developers?

Be Team: Steve, you can answer that one.

Be Team: We are working on a strategy for Java virtual machine right now. I would expect that later this year. When we know we will tell you.

Alex Osadziski: We think the price went down big time today, with HP announcing their own.

A Speaker: I work in two lab settings at the University of Texas where there is a lot of people involved in media contents creation and development of standards. So my question concerns multi-user support, what's its future priority in BeOS?

Be Team: We have, you know, the rudiments of it are there, the kernel knows about UID, if you don't have your UID Be 0 IE route the permissions are actually honored, even the rest of the support, no, having log-ins, multiple counts and so on is more work and I think that will gain in priority as time goes on as we fill out the rest of the more important holes such as 1394, USB support, SCSI and all the other big things that require kernel work.

Be Team: It's something we want to do eventually and as we put stuff in, we tried not to prevent it from happening in the future, so like designing, you know, the where files go in the system and stuff, we tried to have an eye towards that. But it's not something we are doing, we don't have like an active plan to do it right now.

Be Team: A plea to developers is that applies to you, too. So you should think in your own development of the prospects of multiple people running your applications and you will see within our APIs that we... that try and make that easier for you, you should try to help us out, too, don't wait to do things for yourself.

Be Team: That's enough developer abuse, Andrew, thank you.

A Speaker: As far as the academic market, Metrowerks is always very good at giving us tools at very discounted prices and so on. Are you guys going to continue with that as far as the system and also encourage, for us to, the developers here to keep prices low for students and the academicians? There is a lot of good work going on there and in scientific visualization areas, too. Moving very quickly.

Alex Osadziski: The answer is absolutely yes. The reason we don't have our act together fully on shipping menu CodeWarrior for BeOS release 4 and all the educational pricing and so on, I didn't get around to doing it yet. It will be one of my priorities this coming week. Yes, we do intend to have educational pricing for the new CW, no question. And it will be lower than the commercial pricing, too.

(Applause.)

A Speaker: When can we expect that? I was planning on running out and buying CodeWarrior but I am still a student.

Alex Osadziski: You are a student did you say?

A Speaker: I am, yes.

Alex Osadziski: I will do my best to get it done this coming week. Don't... tell you what, if you buy it and we drop the price, we will refund the price difference to you.

Jean-Louis Gassee: Buy now.

Be Team: Buy.

Alex Osadziski: In the form of useful BeOS vouchers. Purchase a wide variety of goods.

A Speaker: You are an Internet native operating system and I understand that BeOS applications will be able to communicate over the Internet. Do you have someone looking into security issues?

Be Team: It sort of goes along with security, multi-use user as well. But Russ, if you have...

Be Team: We are talking to RSA, it's kind of early, but we do hope to have SSL at least in NetPositive and if things go well, possibly security available for other developers as well. But it is early and we are looking into it.

A Speaker: Do you think you will fit on the stage next year same time?

Jean-Louis Gassee: Yes.

Be Team: Bigger stage.

Jean-Louis Gassee: No, smaller people.

Be Team: Snip snip.

(Applause.)

A Speaker: I realize this is probably not a priority now, but I'm wondering about the gaming market because we have seen what happened to Apple when they overlooked the gaming market. And so I was wondering what we are doing in that area.

Alex Osadziski: What do you mean it's not a priority?

Jean-Louis Gassee: There is no decent platform without games.

(Applause.)

Jean-Louis Gassee: And if you really want to express yourselves in the world as a media OS, what better way than to have the really kick ass games? So please.

A Speaker: When does the quick port come out?

Be Team: It's been done for a while. I can't do anything with it.

Alex Osadziski: We have tested it extensively. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, bang. I never play it myself, though.

A Speaker: What about home automation, something come to mind with X 10?

Be Team: Currently we don't have any support for X 10, but if a developer were to be interested in doing that we would be happy to help.

Be Team: I've got one of those systems at home. I'm interested in doing something with it. If anybody would like to participate in some effort later this year, then send me, AWKP, some e-mail. I share your interest.

A Speaker: How would you describe that relationship with Intel?

Be Team: I don't know. Why don't we ask someone from Intel.

A Speaker: I think as the sole survivor from Intel I want to thank you all for being receptive to all the work that Be is doing with us, despite us probably, also, and you know, certainly we are very happy that Be is working with us and we are very happy to see all the excitement that you guys have in Be working with us. So thank you very much.

(Applause.)

Be Team: I think on our part we would like to thank our friends at Intel too in all the help they gave us in doing the initial port. Jim has been wonderful in helping us navigate our way through the big corporation to get the little nuggets of goodness. Thank you.

Alex Osadziski: The reason the other Intel people aren't here, they heard Greg's K6 remarks yesterday.

A Speaker: When will we see cross compilation in both directions?

Be Team: I guess I get to take this one. Currently the CodeWarrior tools that Metrowerks was getting ready to have available for shipping that we are now going to be doing, there are binaries for cross compilation. You can on the PowerPC side, compile an x86 BeOS application. And link it and the same thing on the x86 side. Internally what we have been suggesting, what I have suggested in newsletter articles, is that we haven't internally tested it as much as Metrowerks has. We are sure that it works well, but in general when you are writing for a cross-platform OS, you need to do the testing yourself. And if you have got to do the testing on a machine, you might as well just compile on that machine because you have got the tools there.

So that's our current suggestion. If you currently own an x86 machine and can't get ahold of a PowerPC machine to test on, we do encourage you to use cross compilation tools when you buy the full set and work with other developers to make sure it gets tested correctly. It's very much our goal that we are one OS, we are not an OS with like, you know, all the applications on one platform and not on the other. We really want you guys to work together on that.

A Speaker: Last year's keynote was Netscape announcing support for the BeOS. I was wondering if there was any update on progress of Netscape servers or Navigator or Communicator being moved over.

Jean-Louis Gassee: Thank you. As you know, Netscape's strategy has changed rather drastically of late. And as a result they are recasting their own priorities and I would rather wait for the dust to settle to see where we are, so we, you know, we have a very good relationship with them, I happen to sit on the board of 3Com with Jim Barksdale, so I saw him yesterday afternoon. I tried to mug him, actually, and we will know next week if I have been successful. But I give him an investment packet to put his own personal money in Be.

So we will see what happens. So the relationship is ongoing, as you can see. When they have changed their priorities on products such as Communicator, they are putting the Java, their Java product has fallen by the wayside as it happens. So there is a little bit of confusion, so bear with us, please.

A Speaker: In regards to the Intel port and PowerPCs for those of us who aren't ready to give up Macs just yet, and I think it's great it's running on both platforms, does any one of you up there know the status of SheepShaver and has anyone considered booting from open firmware instead of Mac OS?

A Speaker: SheepShaver is going nicely. I'm working on it, it will run nicely. Their web site has listed their recent updates which I think include sounds and I even believe networking, so it looks like it's all systems go for that on R3.

As for booting from open firmware, we have no plans to do that any time soon.

Jean-Louis Gassee: The next developer conference I would love to be apprised of a product named WinShaver. We say we want to co-exist peacefully with the most successful general purpose OS, to do something like SheepShaver on the Intel architecture, that would be very nice. If any one of you... let us know.

Be Team: And you could make a lot of money doing it.

A Speaker: Is it just the name or the functionality?

(Applause.)

Jean-Louis Gassee: I'm sorry?

A Speaker: Was it the name or the functionality?

A Speaker: BillShaver.

A Speaker: The Intel release which seems to be pretty cool and have represented a lot of work, some of us who haven't spent a lot of time in the Intel world were of course, you know, we are noticing the tiny bumps on the surface of a huge body of work, so bear with me. Some of us were a little dismayed to notice things aren't exactly the same between the two of them and in particular, and I might be mangling words here, the run time architecture seems to be a little bit different in terms or at least in terms of the way libraries behave, the way certain declarations are dealt with by the compilers.

I'm curious as somebody who tries never to deal with hardware at this level, but is curious about it, is that an architectural issue with Intel or is that an issue of gosh, you have to get it out sometime and you wanted to release this year and if the latter, can we hope to ever see a change?

Be Team: There are some differences in the binaries on PowerPC, you have path, on the Microsoft format we had differences and we had of course to adapt to the new world of PE. Metrowerks has done a good job in trying to adjust the two compilers so now the new PowerPC compiler that will come out with R3, will accept the same... the same syntax to export symbols for example, from add-ons.

We talked about the run time. The differences between the run time the way you build an application, there are some differences but they are fairly minimal. Remember that what you see, what you see now is all R3 Intel, you will see the R3 is fairly similar.

Be Team: All the messy declspec stuff will compile for Intel.

A Speaker: This is a follow-up question, are there any long term plans to go to FAT binaries, probably using something like Elf?

Be Team: No.

A Speaker: How about Elf support in general?

Be Team: No. I mean we have chosen to go with PE because it is by far the predominant binary format for that platform with the windows, so we are just going with the flow and where most of the tools are.

A Speaker: Why don't you go with Windows API?

Be Team: Enough, enough.

Be Team: Eject that person.

A Speaker: When will there be support for SIS or VIA chip sets (inaudible) non-Intel processors?

Be Team: A lot of them work. But not... so right now we don't have a lot of them in-house, right now we are basically trying to focus on the Intel chip set. A lot of them do end up working. There are subtle differences that we discover on a one by one basis as we run into them.

So we are, you know, we are committing to supporting the Intel chip sets and whatever else happens to work on it at this point. We will sort of take those on a case-by-case basis.

A Speaker: What are the plans for compatibility between Intel and PowerPC file systems and also resource files on both systems?

Be Team: As for the file systems to be able to move a Zip disk for example between a PowerPC and an Intel machine it's on my plate, I forget which release it's for, either R4 or R5, you can bet it will be pretty soon. That's a fairly hot issue.

Be Team: Today you have a number of tools to convert from PowerPC to Intel resources, it's not very convenient and it's likely that we will have something better in the future, R5. Don't expect it for R4, perhaps R5.

A Speaker: Do you mean that would be transparent compatibility or some kind of...

Be Team: Perhaps. We are not committing to anything. Something more convenient than what we have now.

A Speaker: Okay.

Be Team: I'd like to add in terms of the resource format, when we do make it some day transparently compatible, if you are writing your own type of data into the resource you still have to deal with endian issues just like you do now. In say the BMessage object, if you write your own data you need to worry about endianness. But the framework of the object will be compatible across platforms.

A Speaker: In the R4 time frame are you guys planning on being able to mount volumes on a file system over the network? File share? BFS system, file share?

Be Team: With BFS we have no plans, as I said before, Samba or something like that may be made to work. Some people working on a FTP file system and NFS is around, as well both kinds for BeOS. I haven't used it very extensively though, but you can get it.

A Speaker: I was wondering, as more drivers are recreated for the Intel version, are they going to be released when they are done or do we have to wait for R4 for them to come out?

Be Team: Drivers for what?

A Speaker: Graphics drivers and whatnot?

Be Team: I can handle that one. I think we won't wait for release. If we have drivers that are generally useful, we will put them up on the web site.

(Applause.)

A Speaker: Sorry, just a... another question. Now that Be is doing the IDE, is there, maybe there currently is, but support for plugging in other compilers, say other than the Metrowerks compilers, GCC, things like that? Is that of interest?

Be Team: We are actively evaluating that.

Jean-Louis Gassee: Very good.

Alex Osadziski: Surprisingly restrained.

A Speaker: This one is actually tied to the question about drivers. The drivers are going to be made available but how are you going to install them if you can't boot into the BeOS off the CD to do so?

Alex Osadziski: Boot off a floppy.

A Speaker: At present the floppy boots onto a BeOS partition on the CD, which only has the drivers for the currently supported hardware. As you make new drivers available on the web, how are you going to get the installer on the CD to work with them?

Be Team: As Steve said, generally useful drivers, obviously you can't release a SCSI driver that you can't boot off of. For instance, a 1394 driver would be generally useful and we could release that.

Be Team: And sort of issuing a new CD. Basically there are ways to get around that if you have a lot of extra hardware or if you can borrow some for a time. That is a fundamental problem, you know, if you need a driver to boot it has to be on the CD. We can't do anything about that without issuing a new CD and that's R4.

A Speaker: I thought that at boot time it checked the floppy disk for drivers before it checked the hard disk for drivers. What order does the CD-ROM drive fit in there? I thought the floppy was checked before the hard disk for new drivers.

Be Team: It is if the floppy is mounted but we don't mount the floppy from the CD-ROM. So it currently is not very useful.

A Speaker: Are you continuing research into a stripped down version of the BeOS as set top boxes or embedded chips?

Jean-Louis Gassee: Yes, we are looking into that. But right now we would like to focus as much as possible on executing on the current program, including ourselves in developing, giving momentum to a platform. We know the platform can be implemented in an extremely small footprint, actually we have demonstrations where on a floppy you could put the BeOS and NetPositive and you rip the hard disk out and put the floppy in to boot and you are on the net.

We can do small footprint implementation, a subset of the imagesr OS. Our priority right now is execute what we presented during this conference.

A Speaker: And then I would like to ask about not maybe the PowerPC 750, but what about other PowerPC chip sets? Are we going to see something happen with that or we just... should we all just forget about PowerPC and move forward?

Jean-Louis Gassee: Actually, this is not a question for us. You know, we will work with people who see that we can be helpful to their hardware platform. Seriously, we don't want to get in the way of specifically Apple has a strategy, they don't see fit to cooperate with us, hey, we have a lot of fun stuff to do. So we are not going to offer help with their strategy, we wish them to be very successful, so if that changes, fine, if it does not change, fine.

A Speaker: If Steve has an accident or something...

Be Team: How much are you asking?

Jean-Louis Gassee: We will have Valerie to help.

A Speaker: Tell us another Jean-Louis story.

Jean-Louis Gassee: No, no. This is a family room.

A Speaker: Along those lines, this is probably a question more for you, Mac, would they consider shipping a Be only G3 machine? Could there be life without Apple hardware continuing on the PowerPC platform?

Jean-Louis Gassee: I will give you my opinion. No. No, because you know, the strategy we have on the Intel architecture is in many respects very realistic because we are not trying to be the, I was going to say "be all", all right, all right. The universal or general purpose operating system. Such a suggestion as you are making, technically is very feasible and there is good software, exciting software for it. But a lot of people say well, but my word processors, Microsoft Office and all that stuff, and the current strategy we have with Intel architecture is hey, you like Microsoft Office, you know, you can use Windows 95 or Windows NT, (inaudible) applications can move it to the BeOS and everyone is happy and there is no... there is less of a barrier to adopting the BeOS because you have the safe feeling of having the general purpose OS available to you at the flick of a switch.

So a G3 BeOS only, you know business, I would not encourage our friends at UMAX, I value the relationship with them, they have been very, very helpful to us. So I would not want them to embark on something that personally I would not believe in.

A Speaker: Based on the quality of the stuff we are seeing from Gobe and BeWare and others, I think the strategy of co-existence, I think conquering might be a better idea.

Jean-Louis Gassee: Well, thank you, but no. I have no taste for that kind of suicidal approach. IBM with all their money tried to do better DOS than DOS, better Windows than Windows, then what? I, you know, I would be thrilled, as I said, to be... for us to be the lions of the audio-visual space.

A Speaker: DOS better DOS, but they didn't try to be totally different. I think Be can be a totally new operating system. You don't need to reboot to anything else ever.

A Speaker: They did try to be different. And it sucks.

Jean-Louis Gassee: I don't know what the gentleman is talking about. There is no... let's be very clear. There is no benefit for us in kicking sand into Bill Gates's face. You know? Look at what... you talk about Netscape or Sun. You know? As someone said, don't moon the ogre. You said this, Dominic, right? Dominic is the author of the alternator T-shirt.

A Speaker: Following up the questions on WebTV and all this stuff, asking a very hypothetical question, supposing somebody has a device, what kind of... what kind of footprint, the smallest footprint that we are looking at for BeOS?

Jean-Louis Gassee: We will take that question off line, there is no simple answer to that. So, you know, I appreciate the interest. If there is a business opportunity for that, we will look into it but as I said, we know there is some potential there. I even had a conversation with Andy Grove, I brought... on February 4 when we did the first closing of our round of investment we were all very happy, so I visited with Andy Grove, gave him two T-shirts, extra images, black, because he wanted them to run in.

So we had a very nice conversation because we saw that we have a very nice technical relationship with Intel and we could do wonderful things together. And, you know, I thanked him for the relationship with Intel and told him look, this is... we haven't met a Bozo yet at Intel, this is great. And he cautioned me about working with a images company because he says, well, in a images company, a images company, you will be disappointed some day. I said all right, he said maybe in the future you can, I see you also having a place in the embedded space. Because he knew some of the characteristics of our OS.

So a lot of people agree with you. But we want to execute what we are executing now. Once we execute that, figure out... it's like the adventure games. You play well in the first level, you get more weapons and more lives and you jump up one level, let's execute, let's play well, let's win at this level. That's what we want to do. Not spread ourselves too thin. You know software is... there is always more you can do with software, we have been so far, you know, trying to do a little bit less than as opposed to do a lot more. And we would like to stay focused this way.

(Applause.)

A Speaker: Occasionally it's been pointed out that no one praises software by pointing out it's Windows like. There are a lot of Windows developers who presumably are going to enter the BeOS market while the technology is nice. I'm curious if you guys are taking any steps to put forth some reasonably comprehensive user guidelines to steer people, if at least on the true course, on the nontrue course.

Be Team: We are actively working on interface guidelines.

A Speaker: What?

A Speaker: This is the fifth annual showing of this answer.

A Speaker: I know. But unlike the last conference the answer was that I had a budget to do that or something like that... something bizarre like that. So we actually are in the middle of that process. We have a bunch of chapters completed and we are working with a real writer and real people passionate about making some good interface guidelines, so they will be out as soon as we are finished. They will probably be out on the web initially right next to the Be Book and all the other documentation on line.

A Speaker: Are you looking at months or a year?

Be Team: No, some number of few months.

(Applause.)

A Speaker: With regards to that issue, I have been seeing a lot of really interesting interface ideas and different graphical designs and I would like to see that that... those guidelines are reviewed by not just people in Be but some of those innovative developers who are doing really cool interface stuff. I don't want to see just one sort of opinion, I would like to see, you know, the people who are going to actually be doing interfaces to have feedback on the process.

Jean-Louis Gassee: There will be no UI at all at Be. We encourage you to violate the UI guidelines.

Scott Paterson: I think we are going to go ahead and take three more questions, then wrap up the Q and A.

A Speaker: Just let me ask this real quick. Can we get what you have now out on the net as soon as possible? Solely because we have been hearing that the UI guidelines would be coming, since I don't remember when. If we could just finally get something out, even if you guys say basically all of this is wrong. And it's not...

Be Team: We will look at that. I don't remember the exact set of chapters that we have worked on, if there is like a nice set of what we have done, yes, there is nothing wrong with. .. even if it refers to other chapters not written, it's not going to do anything bad.

A Speaker: I would really prefer it.

Be Team: It won't suck.

A Speaker: At this point anything is better than nothing.

Be Team: We hear you. And agree.

A Speaker: It also gives us a better chance to comment on them.

Be Team: You will comment on them even once they come out. I mean because 1.0, once we finish a release of course there is the next release. Just like our software, that's going to be an interim process, new chapters will come on line. As some developer does something cool and a lot of people start to follow that, then we will have guidelines for that new direction.

A Speaker: Coming from an X based environment, I'm very familiar with focus follows mouse, I'm glad that's in there now. But I'm also very fond of being able to customize it so you can hold Alternate down to move the mouse anywhere in the window or lower it. Is there any time line for those modifications?

Be Team: We are continuing looking at improving and adding more features to the user interface. We polished up focus follows mouse and we worked on ways to navigate around Windows and hide and show, so send us your ideas and we are continually improving it. I don't have specific time lines on when any specific feature will get in.

Scott Paterson: And the final question? Anybody? Okay. Down here in the front.

A Speaker: I just wonder if you had any idea when and where the next DC was. Give us some time to prepare for Masters Awards.

Scott Paterson: We don't have a date for the next Be DC yet and the next Masters round is open as of right now. Date for those Masters Awards will be at our next Be DC and we will announce it as soon as possible.

Alex Osadziski: We are tentatively scheduling a Be DC after September 15. Valerie is already looking for...

A Speaker: Location?

Alex Osadziski: Bay Area.

A Speaker: France?

Alex Osadziski: This bay. There is only one bay. With that, boy, is there a hyphen in anal retentive? So with that I would like to invite our fearless leader and chairman of the board Jean-Louis, to close the conference. He is going to come and hit me.

Jean-Louis Gassee: You know, you have seen my signature on e-mail, the mind of a Frenchman, which is unfortunately trapped inside the body of Frenchman. I need the height to see and be seen.

So I'd like to say thanks to all of you for spending these two days with us. I said yesterday I felt very optimistic about our prospects and also a little nervous about all the work we have ahead of us. We have a lot to do and a lot to prove. So I am of two minds, today, as I was yesterday. I'd like to also to say a word of thanks to someone who is not here today, our CTO, Erich Ringewald, who has been with the company over seven years. He decided to step down and spend more time doing some consulting work, so he was not here with us today but is somebody I want to acknowledge his contribution to where we are today and the kind of product we have. The kind of team we have assembled is certainly due in great part to his leadership. So I would like to say my personal and collective thanks to Erich for that.

Other than that, I've seen great software, we are, you know, I'm surrounded by a great team of clearly independent thinkers. And I like that. Because this is a very competitive business. So we want sharp minds and of course the sharp tongues that come with them. It's always interesting. Come this June this will be 30 years I'm in this lovely business. I was hired by HP in 1968 to introduce the ancestors of the desktop computers, the HP 9100, so I've been in this business for now close to 30 years. It is even more interesting, I'm even more excited about the business than I was in 1968. I've, you know I've gained a few scars in the process but most of them feel good when I put my finger on them because I've learned from them.

So this has been, this conference has been a wonderful experience. I know I speak for all the Be team. I really appreciate what everyone has done, you, and the Be team for this conference. So thank you very, very much. It's been a wonderful time and I look forward to the next one around September 15th.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)