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Jean-Louis Gassée Column

Be Incorporated, founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Sakoman, is a software company focusing on building new foundations for the next generation of digital content and media design tools. With a team of industry-leading engineers and business executives in the United States, Europe, and Japan, the company is dedicated to removing the limitations of existing computer architectures and delivering a new level of price performance on both personal computers and Internet appliances. In October 1995, Be introduced BeOS at Agenda 96. The demo was done on multiprocessor hardware Be had specially developed, the BeBox. The first public developer release, BeOS for the BeBox, was distributed in April 1996. August 1996 brought the first demonstrations of BeOS for Power Macintosh hardware, and in January 1997 Be discontinued the BeBox to concentrate solely on BeOS. On July 14th 1997 Be shipped the first public, commercial release of BeOS for PowerPC, BeOS Preview Release. Preview Release 2 shipped later that year, in October 1997. In March 1998, BeOS crossed the processor chasm, with the shipment of BeOS Release 3, the first version of BeOS for Intel Architecture processors, and Be's first cross-platform software release. Later that year, in November 1998, Be introduced BeOS Release 4, the latest major release of the product, featuring the new high-performance Media Kit among many other new features. In June of 1999, Be raised the bar in realtime digital media with the release of BeOS 4.5, featuring media kit enhancements and a 3D audio mixer. On July 20, 1999, Be Inc. became a publicly traded company (Nasdaq:BEOS), with an IPO of 6,000,000 shares of common stock. In January of 2000, Be announced it focus on the internet appliance market. In March, BeOS 5 was released and a version made available for free via download over the Internet. BeOS soon "went platinum" with over 1,000,000 recorded downloads. Over four million CDs containing BeOS were distributed worldwide. At the Demo 2000 conference, Be formally announced their client platform designed for internet appliances, BeIA, and began to build and expand various partnerships. This was followed by the introduction of BeIA MAP, the first complete solution for internet appliances. MAP is comprised of server-based software components and remote management services that seamlessly interface to manage any BeIA-powered Internet appliance. Be Incorporated is based in scenic Menlo Park, California and has European headquarters in Paris. Be currently has over 100 employees worldwide.

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