Dec., 10th, 2001 4.20pm CST | "Goatse.cx" Edition
BeOS is Dying

Sad Story Submission by Sandwich Boy
Dec. 10th, 2001

Now that BeOS is deader than a dead thing, here is a nice Slashdot troll for you to cut and paste, so that BeOS is not forgotten:

*BeOS is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BeOS community when last month IDC confirmed that *BeOS accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BeOS has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BeOS is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [sysadminmag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BeOS's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BeOS faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BeOS because *BeOS is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BeOS. As many of us are already aware, *BeOS continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBeOS is the most endangered of them all.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBeOS leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBeOS. How many users of BeOS Pro are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBeOS versus BeOS Pro posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 BeOS Pro users. BeOS/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of BeOS Pro posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BeOS/OS. A recent article put FreeBeOS at about 80 percent of the *BeOS market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBeOS users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBeOS Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Be, Inc., abysmal sales and so on, FreeBeOS went out of business and was taken over by Palm who sell another troubled OS. Now BeOSI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BeOS has steadily declined in market share. *BeOS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BeOS is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BeOS continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BeOS is dead."