[openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V8 #104

> -----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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