Be's Hardware Plans

January, 1997

Dear Be Developers,

We've taken the decision to focus purely on software development and to cease production of the BeBox. We want to explain what led to this decision and what this implies for you, our developers.

Be's goal is to make the BeOS the premier platform for digital content design. To that end, the BeOS was designed to take advantage of high-performance hardware and to take particular advantage of multiprocessor hardware. Until recently, low-cost MP machines have been scarce, and they were scarcer still in 1990 when the original BeBox was conceived. The BeBox, in its various forms and revisions, was designed to prove the point that you _can_ build an MP personal computer, and we'd like to think that it succeeded in doing just that.

In 1996, we ported the BeOS to the PowerMac architecture, and began to see the advantages of running our OS on widely-available, mass-market hardware. With the advent of MP PowerMacs from Apple, Power Computing, DayStar, and others yet to come, we've been able to run the BeOS on some pretty impressive hardware, ranging from very low-cost 603-family desktops through to hulking testosterone devices like the quad 200MHz 604e DayStar machine.

It's very hard, actually impossible, for a small 50-person company like Be to keep up with the hardware engineering resources of the entire PowerMac market. At Macworld in San Francisco last month, it became very clear that almost all the developer and future user interest was in the BeOS for PowerMac. Sure, if we could build a quad 604 BeBox and ship it this quarter for $3,000, or even $5,000, we'd have a winner on our hands. But, our investigations revealed that products like this take a lot of time and money to develop, and cost a lot to build, especially in low volumes.

In addition, a very large part of our, and our developers', target market of digital content designers uses PowerMacs and applications running on the MacOS. By offering the BeOS on PowerMacs, we allow them to run on their existing hardware (with greater performance, functionality and stability) and to run their existing MacOS apps, either by dual-booting or by using VirtualMac technology.

Finally, we faced an ethical dilemma: as we license hardware vendors to bundle the BeOS, we have a potential conflict of interest. How do we optimize between our hardware sales and making the BeOS available on other manufacturers' hardware? This conflict of interest faces any company that sells an OS on its own hardware while licensing it to other hardware manufacturers. We've chosen to avoid the conflict in the simplest way possible.

So, what does this mean for current BeBox owners?

We will honor the warranties on all the BeBoxes that we've sold, of course. We'll make best efforts to keep spares available for as long as possible after the last warranty has expired. Remember, most of the content of a BeBox is off-the-shelf PC hardware and should be maintainable for many years. Releases of the BeOS planned for the next 3 years (changed 1/31/97 -- see below) will support the BeBox and we'll make best efforts to continue support beyond that.

And what does this mean for all Be developers?

Most of the people using the BeOS today are already using it on PowerMacs. Given the availability of exciting low-cost UP and MP PowerMacs from Power Computing, Apple and others, the cost of entry to developing for the BeOS is lower than ever. However, in the spirit of lowering this cost even further, we're preparing some special developer packages that we'll announce shortly.

The BeBox's unique i/o capabilities are becoming less unique as media-rich i/o becomes more accessible on mass-market machines. We're already working on video and audio drivers for emerging and existing PowerMac hardware.

However well-reasoned and reasonable this decision is, we know that all such transitions can cause pain and inconvenience. As a company and a team that knows in its bones how important it is to work closely and well with our developers for our mutual success, we want to ensure that we do our best to make this transition as smooth as possible for our BeBox owners. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Alex Osadzinski, for the Be team.

JLG