why Be is doomed...

CobraBoy (tbyars@earthlink.net)
Fri, 17 Jan 1997 10:21:32 -0800


For any of you that didn't get to MacWorld and see the Be OS here it is in
a nutshell. What Be has brought to the ball game is the nice tabbed windows
and color. The OS is pretty much a joke, good for impressing Mac - o -
philes but to anyone that has seen a real OS run (NeXTStep) it is laughable
at best. Comparing this beta .82 developer release to NeXTStep .9 (the
first shipping version in 87) is not even possible. It should be labeled
Aplha .25.

Anyway what is to happen to Be? They are doomed. Be is banking on the
"geek" factor. Well let's explore that factor. Geek's usually don't have a
lot of disposable income. A geek will take a $35K a year job third shift to
sit on a fat T1 without a lot of supervision over the high stress $75K a
year marketing gig. So let's explore what a geek wants.

A Be Box will sell (either a real Be or PowerComputing Clone) out the door
for around $3k. Let's look at today's paper and see what we can build a
Geek Box of our own for.

All this is a one stop shopping trip to Fry's.

120 Mhz Pentium/PCI mother board 256K Cache / E- IDE $195.00
512K Cache $19.95
Fujitsu 2.5GB E-IDE Drive $225.00
32 Meg RAM $120.00
MiniTower Case and PS $25.00
Diamond 64 Video PCI $119.00
Floppy (guess) $50.00
SoundBlaster 8X CD-ROM 16 bit sound card (guess) $199.99
Cool metallic blue spray paint $2.99
Linux Slackware CD-ROM $20.00

Granted a P-120 isn't exactly state of the art. However it is more than
sufficent for most "geeking"

Total? $975.00 for a P-120 32/2.5/8X 64 Bit video/16 bit audio system.

This system would also run magically delicious on something like NeXTStep
3.3, if you happen to have a complete install CD laying around. :-)

Tim

--

I got two turntables and a microphone...

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