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-- Palm buys Be! (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=17628)
Posted by bradhaak on 08-17-2001 01:03 AM:
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Palm buys Be!
quote:
Originally posted by foo fighter
Ha! Bet Gassee really regrets turning down that 125 million offer from Apple now. 11 mil is chump change compared to that.
Not even 11 mil in cash. That's 11 million dollars worth of stock. Definitely a great deal.
This might also have something to do with why the stock isn't responding. Even though this is a great deal, the last thing Palm needs right now is another 2-3/4 million shares diluting value.
But in the long run, this has got huge upside for palm.
Posted by ernieba1 on 08-17-2001 01:49 AM:
Um, sorry for playing the stupid game, but, what does this mean to me, student, or anybody else who doesn't entirely understand what you are talking about?
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Posted by bradhaak on 08-17-2001 02:25 AM:
quote:
Originally posted by ernieba1
Um, sorry for playing the stupid game, but, what does this mean to me, student, or anybody else who doesn't entirely understand what you are talking about?
Not stupid at all.
Be was started about a decade ago by ex-Apple folks to make a very sophisticated, easy-to-use, multi-tasking OS. They made a really nice product with an emphasis on portability between processor types and multimedia. The problem was that they never really caught on. Recently, they have been working on an embedded version of their OS for Internet appliances. The Sony IA actually uses BeIA (BE OS for Internet appliances). Now, they are at the end of their rope. No money and very few customers, but with a very good, non-standard product.
Enter Palm, who has a commanding market share but needs a more powerful OS for their next generation of products. Palm has been working on Palm OS 5 that will run on ARM based processors. This is the same CPU that is in the IPAQ. It is many time more powerful than the processors that are in the current Palms. The goal for Palm is to develop a multitasking, multithreaded OS with multimedia capabilities. The new OS also needs to have a compatibility mode that will allow it to run existing Palm apps. Oh yeah, did I mention that they need it in the fall of 2002? This is a huge and nearly impossible task.
So Palm buys Be. Suddenly they have an OS that meets most of their requirements: multitasking, multithreading, multimedia, robustness. It also has a really cool plug-in filesystem. This means that you can easily replace the filesystem to run on different type of storage devices. In the case of Palm OS, they will probably make it run directly from RAM and OEMs can make plug-in modules to run different types of expansion memory.
The task for Palm is now to port the OS to run on ARM, since today it runs on PPC and x86. They also have to put together a Palm-like UI and create an SDK for us developer folks. Then they can work on a classic Palm OS compatibility mode and create interfaces to the actual hardware that it will be running on.
These remaining tasks seem like a lot of work, but compared to the task of creating an entire OS from scratch, they are trivial.
So what this means to the end-user is that this is the basis of the OS that new Palm OS devices will be running at the end of next year. It also means that Palm now has a chance for long term survival.
The purchase of Be probably also has a lot to do with Alan Kessler (the head of the OS development team) leaving Palm. As I remember, there was serious negotiation about a year ago for Palm to license the EPOC OS (I think, but could have been Symbian - I never figured out what the difference between them is). Kessler objected to this strongly and was given the chance to develop the nextgen OS internally. I would say that todays two stories kind of tell the results of this effort. 
I am writing this mostly from memory, so anyone that has more accurate info, please chip in and tell me where I'm wrong (as if I need to say this to you guys).
Posted by slotmachine on 08-17-2001 03:00 AM:
I spent about 5 minutes on the BeOS website without finding any screenshots of the GUI? Does anybody out there have any good links? I did notice a few of the BeOS icons on the sidebar of their page. Now I get where the name for the "BeBop" SilverScreen theme came from.
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That IS a Palm III form-factor in my pocket, AND I'm happy to see you.
Posted by foo fighter on 08-17-2001 03:45 AM:
Here you go slotmachine!
http://www.ccrb.demon.co.uk/beos/beos_screenshots.htm
As you can see, it's very Mac-like.
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Posted by foo fighter on 08-17-2001 03:52 AM:
Here's some more:
http://www.clarkson.edu/~hillbr/beosscreen.htm
http://hermes.spaceports.com/~northjac/Screenshots.htm
At least you get the idea of what the GUI looks like.
One thing that these screenshots do not show is that you can take the tool palette and drag it to the bottom of the screen and make BeOS look exactly like Windows, right down to the start menu. This is one reason why I immediately took to BeOS more so than any other Windows "alternative".
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My blog: Pocketfactory
Posted by mikedemo on 08-17-2001 05:04 AM:
I played around with BeOS when it first came out. Its a sweet OS. I just hope Palm can handle it right and implement the strength of it to the Palm platform properly. This is a good thing but I am worried about Palm blowing it.
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It's all about how you spend the money.
Posted by autocode1 on 08-17-2001 05:19 AM:
I prefer TCSH to BASH. I find the BASH shell annoying.
Posted by slotmachine on 08-17-2001 01:16 PM:
quote:
Originally posted by foo fighter
At least you get the idea of what the GUI looks like.
Sweet! I hope Palm doesn't screw this up....__________________
That IS a Palm III form-factor in my pocket, AND I'm happy to see you.
Posted by Zapp on 08-17-2001 03:50 PM:
quote:
Originally posted by bradhaak
Enter Palm, who has a commanding market share but needs a more powerful OS for their next generation of products. Palm has been working on Palm OS 5 that will run on ARM based processors. This is the same CPU that is in the IPAQ. It is many time more powerful than the processors that are in the current Palms. The goal for Palm is to develop a multitasking, multithreaded OS with multimedia capabilities. The new OS also needs to have a compatibility mode that will allow it to run existing Palm apps. Oh yeah, did I mention that they need it in the fall of 2002? This is a huge and nearly impossible task.
I don't think they bought Be for porting the PalmOS to ARM processors. At last years PalmSource they demonstrated a prototype ARM based system. They were able to beam PocketChess from a Palm V to the prototype. They had both devices running the same application at the same. BTW, the ARM machine just smoked the Palm V.
Posted by John Nowak on 08-17-2001 03:59 PM:
It should be very interesting to see how this all plays out. Hopefully, they'll keep compatability with the old Palm OS applications.
Posted by Galley_SimRacer on 08-17-2001 06:09 PM:
quote:
Originally posted by slotmachine
I spent about 5 minutes on the BeOS website without finding any screenshots of the GUI? Does anybody out there have any good links? I did notice a few of the BeOS icons on the sidebar of their page. Now I get where the name for the "BeBop" SilverScreen theme came from.
Why not try it out? All you have to do is download the Personal Edition of BeOS, and install it like any other Windoze program. It creates a 512MB virtual partition, so there's no partitioning involved on your part. For best results you should create a boot floppy by using the supplied utility. Boot from the floppy and you'll be in BeOS in 15-20 seconds. BeOS supports all Nvidia cards as well as most ATI and Matrox ones. If your card is not supported, it will run in VESA grayscale mode and will be very slow, but a driver download is easy from here
If anyone has any specific questions about hardware compatibility, feel free to ask, or visit this page
As I said in an earlier post, "BeOS is the greatest OS the world has ever seen". Check it out for yourself, it costs nothing for you to use. 
__________________
"Life is what you experience between racing games"
Galley
Posted by bradhaak on 08-17-2001 08:07 PM:
quote:
Originally posted by Zapp
I don't think they bought Be for porting the PalmOS to ARM processors. At last years PalmSource they demonstrated a prototype ARM based system. They were able to beam PocketChess from a Palm V to the prototype. They had both devices running the same application at the same. BTW, the ARM machine just smoked the Palm V.
Care to bet?? 
The demo at palmSource could have been nothing more than a quick and dirty port of the existing Palm OS. Just because something was running on ARM doesn't mean it has anything to do with Palm OS 5. From talking to people at Palm and hanging around with a number of people on the OS team, I can absolutely guarantee that anything that was running in the PalmSource timeframe is not OS 5, since real work hadn't even started then.
I do know that except for a pilot team, the OS dev team was not assigned to the ARM project until last spring when OS 4 was completed. I also know that for a team that size to write a multitasking, multithreaded OS with strong multimedia in less then a year-and-a-half is impossible. If the new OS doesn't have these features, Palm and the entire platform will die.
After the last round of layoffs Palm doesn't have the manpower to work on two OS projects. Getting the new OS out the door next year is Palms only priority. there is no way that they are buying an OS that they can't use for this process.
So let's see, Palm bought an OS that has been recently rewritten for embedded applications. The OS has all of the features that are needed for a product that Palm doesn't have time/resources to develop themselves. Seems pretty clear to me.
Posted by bradhaak on 08-17-2001 08:09 PM:
Double post 
Posted by foo fighter on 08-17-2001 08:37 PM:
quote:
Originally posted by bradhaak
The demo at palmSource could have been nothing more than a quick and dirty port of the existing Palm OS. Just because something was running on ARM doesn't mean it has anything to do with Palm OS 5. From talking to people at Palm and hanging around with a number of people on the OS team, I can absolutely guarantee that anything that was running in the PalmSource timeframe is not OS 5, since real work hadn't even started then.
Yep! Even Palm's own engineers admitted that what was shown at PalmSource was more a "proof of concept" adaptation than an actual full blown OS 5. This is one reason why I'm alway's critical of Palm's development efforts, or lack thereof. Palm seems to drag its feet in building its next generation OS for a long time now. With their purchase of Be, I think we can take that as proof that Palm didn't really have much of a blueprint or clue as to what they were going to do next.
quote:
...I also know that for a team that size to write a multitasking, multithreaded OS with strong multimedia in less then a year-and-a-half is impossible. If the new OS doesn't have these features, Palm and the entire platform will die.
Amen! Now that Palm seems to be heading in this direction, I haven't been this excited since I bought my first Palm in 98. This should be one hell of a ride! Keep your hands on the handle bars at all times! =)
quote:
So let's see, Palm bought an OS that has been recently rewritten for embedded applications. The OS has all of the features that are needed for a product that Palm doesn't have time/resources to develop themselves. Seems pretty clear to me.
Agreed. The only questions that remain are;
1. How much of the BeOS codebase will migrate into the existing PalmOS?
2. How will the consumption of Be impact the next gen Palm UI? Will the PalmOS look more like Be?
3. Will the next gen PalmOS be more like a full blown desktop OS? Or will it be stripped down to skeletal framework?__________________
My blog: Pocketfactory
Posted by Zapp on 08-17-2001 08:52 PM:
quote:
Originally posted by bradhaak
Care to bet??
I'm not really a betting man...
I agree that the demo was just that and that it's great that Palm got the Be intellectual property so that we can look forward to some fantastic multimedia capabilities in the future.
I don't think that Palm ever had any intention of developing the kernel, they would be crazy not to purchase one of the many available (WindRiver comes to mind). We all know that Be doesn't support the ARM at this point (unless they were working on it already -- in which case this is a steal for Palm) and if Palm doesn't have a kernel yet they are in big trouble.
The demo itself showed that they had a kernel with a PalmOS emulator on top. This is far from OS 5, but it at least implies the kernel.
Since you know some Palm engineers, have they actually talked about developing a real-time kernel from scratch? I work on embedded real-time systems and we'd never do something like that for a system of any complexity.
Posted by bradhaak on 08-18-2001 01:50 AM:
quote:
Originally posted by Zapp
I don't think that Palm ever had any intention of developing the kernel, they would be crazy not to purchase one of the many available (WindRiver comes to mind). We all know that Be doesn't support the ARM at this point (unless they were working on it already -- in which case this is a steal for Palm) and if Palm doesn't have a kernel yet they are in big trouble.
BeOs was originally written for the 68K, it was then ported and is still available for both x86, and PowerPC. these architectures are incredibly different, so i would hazard a guess that the code is pretty portable. This should not be an issue.
quote:
The demo itself showed that they had a kernel with a PalmOS emulator on top. This is far from OS 5, but it at least implies the kernel.
It doesn't imply anything, It shows that Palm can write code that can run on the ARM. As I said before, I believe that it was just a port of the existing OS. This is not even a basis for the OS 5 kernel.
quote:
Since you know some Palm engineers, have they actually talked about developing a real-time kernel from scratch? I work on embedded real-time systems and we'd never do something like that for a system of any complexity.ally talked about developing a real-time kernel from scratch? I work on embedded real-time systems and we'd never do something like that for a system of any complexity.
The talk has been about working on OS 5, not any specific part of it. The key part for me, as I mentioned above, is the resignation of Alan Kessler. he has always been a staunch and public advocate of developing the new OS entirely using internal resources. The fact that his resignation was announced simultaneously with the Be announcement is incredibly revealing.
As I said before, you are wlcome to think that Palm purchased Be for some other reason, but there is really nothing to support any conclusion other than BeIA being the root of Palm OS 5.
Of course I could be completely wrong - stay tuned. 
Posted by Zapp on 08-18-2001 03:01 AM:
quote:
Originally posted by bradhaak
It doesn't imply anything, It shows that Palm can write code that can run on the ARM. As I said before, I believe that it was just a port of the existing OS. This is not even a basis for the OS 5 kernel.
The demo did actually imply the use of an emulator. By beaming PocketChess to the prototype they showed that they had it running existing 68K code on an ARM processor. Having said that, it simply showed that they had that layer done and not necessarily the kernel.
It would definitely be great to use the Be environment for OS 5 but like you said before, it really makes you wonder about their schedule.
I could see Kessler's departure having to do with the fact that the effort to build everything internally wasn't working out. Once they made their decision on a kernel he would probably not want to stay.
It's definitely going to be an interesting year!
Posted by homer on 08-18-2001 07:00 PM:
quote:
This is one reason why I'm alway's critical of Palm's development efforts, or lack thereof. Palm seems to drag its feet in building its next generation OS for a long time now.
Agreed. Microsoft, albeit having a much larger army, has been taking Windows CE forward by leaps and bounds. Palm has done very little to advance the pace of evolution of the Palm OS.
Which, in some ways, is OK. The Palm PDA is simple, universal, and a lot of people like it. Hopefully the purchase of Be indicates that Palm has seen a bit of a market saturation for their current products and is ready to move forward on a next-generation PDA.
I'm very happy for Be. It's a great OS and does not deserve to die. I hope Palm keeps developing the full desktop OS as well...
This is basically what happened to Apple. For most of the 90's Apple had done very little to actually evolve their OS. They basically were sitting on their laurels from their success in the 80's. In the meantime, Microsoft slowly krept up and by the time Win95 came out, it was getting very hard to see compelling reasons to go with a Mac over a PC.
(It should be noted that Apple DID do some amazing research products, such as MacOS on a Pentium, Cyberdog, NewtonOS, etc..., but very few of these experiments ever made it into the OS).
So they tried increasing market share through licensing, but that was too little too late. (Though, I think Palm's licensing hasn't been ALL bad...)
By the time they realized that MacOS was 20 years out-dated, they didn't have the time, nor power to start from scratch on a modern OS. Hence the purchase of NeXT.
It's been working for Apple, let's hope it works for Palm!__________________
We're all naked if you turn us inside out.
-David Byrne
Posted by dick-richardson on 08-18-2001 07:51 PM:
quote:
Originally posted by homer
I'm very happy for Be. It's a great OS and does not deserve to die. I hope Palm keeps developing the full desktop OS as well...
Likewise. I may go with BeOS on a home built system, esp. if there would be amazingly tight integration with my visor. Otherwise, I'm going debian.__________________
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Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.
