12/22/1999

Following hot on the heels of the onslaught of the Linux hordes comes BeOS. Created to be able to handle just about anything that a user could possibly aks it to do, and be able to do it quickly and efficiently. Release 4 proved that BeOS was capable of handling everyday tasks, and R4.5.2 has brought BeOS several important steps closer to being a true threat to Windows. Release 4.5.2 requires an even smaller amount of memory to run than Release 4, something Microsoft cannot say about any of its operating systems. The fact that BeOS gets faster and more efficient every release reveals something even subtler about why Be has been so successful at breaking into the OS market in the past few months, the fact that Be's engineers are obsessed with providing the best product they can possibly provide. This dedication to perfection has resulted in an operating system with quite possibly the most elegant GUI ever made and the speed and stability that was once exclusive to high end unix and bsd variants. Should BeOS become a major force in the operating system market, it will spell doom for Microsoft if for no other reason than it will raise the expectations of customers well beyond what they are now.

Despite the ludicrous claims to the contrary by PC World, BeOS has one of the best office suites availible on the market: Gobe Productive 2.0. In a review of BeOS and Linux they claimed that BeOS has no office suite, but Gobe Productive is almost at the same level of capability as WordPerfect. It's price tag is also very liberal, less than $150 for an office suite that provides word processing, spreadsheets, and graphics manipulation. As a basic office suite, Gobe Productive 2.0 will provide all of the features that the average person will need on a daily basis. In fact very few will miss the "features" of Microsoft Office like Macros and VBA (which also happen to be the #1 source for virii). Overall if you have a BeOS compatable printer such as one of the Epson Stylus, HP Deskjet (excluding 720x and 820x) or one of Apple's laser printers then you are good to go. As a low-cost Microsoft Office replacement, Gobe Productive 2.0 more than fits the bill.

The aggresive nature of the BeOS development community is quite different from that of the now borderline complacent Windows development community. BeOS developers are typically much more aggressive at designing quality products not only out of pride in their work, but also because there are no monopolies on any particular kind of software in the BeOS market. This lack of monopolies forces them to constantly compete with each other in order to ensure that they do not lost marketshare. Beatware for example has to ensure that E-Picture is as high quality as possible because it will soon have to deal with GIMP.

As of this writing, BeOpera is currently at version 3.60, beta 7. It has progressed very rapidly in the past few months since it went beta and was released for general purpose testing by BeOS users. It is already even faster than the version for Windows, and from the testing that I have done it handles HTML and JavaScript as well as the Windows version does. The fact that BeOpera is being included in the new Stinger Internet Appliance Platform shows that Opera has come a long way towards being a mainstream competitor to Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator. Once BeOpera is ready for purchasing, it will definitely be on my list of BeOS products to purchase when Release 5 is made availible. As far as the Stinger platform goes, it will be a platform that will seriously threaten Windows CE.