Jean-Louis Gassée Interview (1998)

A snapshot of Be’s direction in 1998 post-Apple merger talks and pre-bankruptcy.

Original text by Henry Bortman.

Selected Jean-Louis Gassée quotes:

“Who could have put a date on not getting fired for using Linux?”

“One of my role models is Michael Dell. […] He looks like a sage in the industry now, but he didn’t always look like this.”

“The simple fact is, today if you write a line of C++ code, chances are you’re competing with Microsoft.”

The 1996 BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP bakeoff story as told by Avie Tevanian.

JLG refers to striking a deal with “a Japanese PC maker”, resulting in preinstalls of BeOS on the Hitachi Flora Prius (not that Prius).

Yes, Apple’s marketing slogan for the Macintosh really was “it does more and it costs less” in the early 1990s. Related comic.

In audio as in video applications, the talk-to-shipping-products ratio was extremely poor. Back in the day I only heard of one video editor shipping on BeOS, Adamation (ex-NeXT!) personalStudio. The BeBits software catalog reflects this as of mid-2000 when third-party application development seemed to stop altogether. I’m not counting the Edirol DV-7 because, like the Otari RADAR system, it was an expensive custom hardware appliance built on top of BeOS, priced mostly out of the reach of casual home users.

Windows NT on PowerPC did exist… briefly.