Craig Burton asks if I used the Be OS or bought a copy. Yes to both (bought a copy at Fry’s a couple of years ago), though I haven’t used it in a while even though I loved its good points. I’ve also bought copies of Red Hat Linux, Mandrake and FreeBSD, because I believe in supporting independent software companies.
For a while I was hoping the music software companies, such as Steinberg, would port their stuff to Be. They didn’t, but the Be OS would have been a fine music-making system. There just weren’t enough apps, for music or anything else.
Gassee did screw up in some ways. He also was in a market trying to develop and sell a commercial product against a monopolist that made certain that OEMs loaded one OS on their computers.