In the world of IT support, there is a significant difference between what is available and what is viable and suitable for the vast majority of businesses, and technical experts are on hand to let you know which is which and help you make the best choice for you.

A good example of this is that whilst there are countless options available in terms of office software packages and suites, the vast majority of businesses will opt for Microsoft Office (Now Microsoft 365), as the most familiar option their staff are almost certainly trained to use.

The same goes for the core operating system Office runs on, Microsoft Windows 11. Everyone who has worked in IT has used at least one version of Windows, even if they make a conscious decision to use alternatives, in the same way that many people in business speak English as either a primary language or lingua franca.

However, with potential security issues such as Microsoft Copilot giving some companies pause, some businesses are exploring potential alternative operating systems and being rather shocked at the paradox of both how much and how little choice they have.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of OSes available to use for various computer systems and with specific development processes in mind, but very few of them are used particularly widely in business, with only Apple’s macOS and Linux having any significant presence.

To find out why that is, here is a major example of a computer system that tried to compete at the same level only to find out just how difficult it can be to forge a legacy quickly.

BeBoxing

In 1990, Be Inc. was founded by former executives from Apple Computers, allegedly starting work on a prototype competitor computer the day after founder Jean-Louis Gassee was forced out by then-CEO John Sculley.

Their approach was quite far ahead of its time, creating a brand new operating system and computer family that would be designed with multiple computer processing units (CPUs) in mind. This is something that would not be standard in Windows until the mid-2000s with the Intel Core.

The result of four years of development was BeOs and the BeBox, both initially launched in 1995 and using the same PowerPC processors that Apple was using around the same time.

The aim was to create a media and internet-focused OS that was free of a lot of the legacy code that competitors needed to keep in order to maintain compatibility. The BeBox was released around the same time as Microsoft Windows 95 and looked promising and competitive to the technologically minded.

Around this time, the computer landscape was shifting significantly and permanently with a focus on uniformity and compatibility.

Whilst small businesses in the late 1980s and early 1990s did not necessarily need to use an IBM PC-Compatible running MS-DOS or Windows 3.1, with plenty using Apple Macintosh machines or even home computers such as the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and Acorn Archimedes, that had very much changed by 1995.

Atari’s computer division had been discontinued after the failure of its video game division. 

Commodore had also dramatically gone bankrupt in 1994, with the successor company Escom on course to lose 185 million Deutsche Marks that year (roughly £80m).

Whilst Acorn was still around, they were primarily focused on the education market, with the Risc PC struggling between the Risc OS education world of the time and a rapidly evolving Windows PC market.

This made BeBox potentially a promising third way, giving users who had to choose something new a relatively clean slate to pick from amongst an ageing Mac OS and the initially unreliable Windows 95.

The BeBox did not last and was discontinued in 1997, just after the BeOS platform was rejected by Apple as the successor for Mac OS in favour of NeXTSTEP.

The reasons for this had nothing to do with BeOS or its capabilities, but more with it becoming a casualty of an internal battle within the boardroom of Apple between CEO Gil Amelio and the board of directors, who were keen to buy NeXT in an attempt to bring Steve Jobs back to Apple.

Be Inc. struggled after this. Steve Jobs stopped the market of Macintosh clone computers that made BeOS viable on the platform and a port of the OS to PC-compatible machines ultimately failed due to Windows 95 becoming ubiquitous in the market.

There are alternatives, but BeOS was supplanted by Mac OS X and Linux as the alternatives to Windows for business users.