[openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V8 #104
- From: "Michael Phipps" <michael.phipps@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:08:03 -0400
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Raymond C. Rodgers" [sinful622@xxxxxxxxx]
> Date: 06/25/2008 13:41
> To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V8 #104
>
> Nicholas Blachford wrote:
> >
> > DarkWyrm wrote:
>
> This echoes very strongly of Be's focus shift. I'm not an expert on
> marketing, and though I'm not sure, I may be the only former Be employee
> on the list, but Be (in my humble opinion) made a grave error with that
> focus shift and bid for the internet appliance market. It wasn't the
> shift itself, but the fact that they/we made no commitment whatsoever to
> BeOS after that point especially in light of the release of BeOS 5 PE. I
> had just been hired by Be a week or two before the focus shift
> announcement, and I was manning the info@xxxxxx email address until
> months after the release of R5, and the amount of interest was
> staggering. There are still emails that ended up in my account that I
> never read because I was too overwhelmed.
That's a nice piece of history to know. :-D I am sure that any other such
stories
would be appreciated. :-)
I suspect that the reasons for the Focus Shaft were investor driven. I would
guess that
Be could have been a decent little 20 or 30 million dollar per year business,
but they
had too much investor money and the investors wanted to "swing for the fences".
> To summarize my wandering thought process, I think it would be a mistake
> to try to target Haiku at the mobile market, though supporting it
> (provided sufficient developer time) is a good idea. There's nothing
> stopping anyone from making a mobile distro of Haiku if the appropriate
> architecture is supported, perhaps it could even become an official
> distribution at some point.
I think that is the idea. I have a Win Mobile 5 phone and I have often
fantasized about
having Haiku on it. :-) I *know* that DW would never support the idea of
ditching the desktop
in favor of mobile.
On the other hand, I would love to play with a distro with a version of the App
Server that *didn't* support
windowing but was something like Ion3 on X. Not as the main or supported
branch, necessarily, but I think
that it would be interesting.
> Of course, now with the Intel Nano processors in the market, mobile
> computing doesn't necessarily mean mostly ARM any more.
I wonder how long it will be before Win Mobile is focused on Nano...
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