Ubuntu TV (a/k/a the new BeIA?) →
The Verge:
Ubuntu TV is a brand new derivitave of Ubuntu, with a full-in TV-optimized UI inspired by Unity, and full-on media center and DVR features. There’s a movie, TV and music store, a YouTube app, and of course it’s all optimized for a lean-back remote experience. The software will be free for manufacturers to package with their TVs, and Ubuntu says there will be TVs on shelves by the end of the year. Canonical sees itself as a “neutral player,” as opposed to the walled gardens of Apple and Google.
I can’t help but wonder if this is going to be Ubuntu’s BeIA. What’s BeIA, you ask? Around 1999, there was a fantastic new operating system called BeOS, which was attracting a lot of attention and gaining modest amounts of attention, particularly in niche fields like real-time media processing. (For a few years, all of the Cirque de Soleil shows, as well as a few Broadway and Las Vegas shows, were being run from BeOS-based equipment.) It was starting to get wider attention, too: “Neverwinter Nights” was originally announced as having a BeOS version to ship with the PC and Mac versions. But, BeOS’s makers had decided that if they couldn’t get their OS shipped on a mainstream PC, nothing else mattered, and they either weren’t able or willing to sit around for a few more years letting it grow. So they effectively orphaned BeOS by making it free, and put their resources into BeIA, a customized version of BeOS for internet appliances, which was the big buzz at the time.
It sank without a trace. Be’s remains were bought by Palm, which was supposed to release a new version of PalmOS based around Be technology, but we never saw that out of the labs, either. The two lessons I took away from this:
Free operating systems are perceived as having little to no market for commercial software. Nearly all of the commercial software available for BeOS was gone within six months of that switch (and while that wasn’t a huge amount, BeOS arguably had as many commercial end-user applications available for it in two years than Linux had managed in ten).
Just because everybody is talking about something as the Next Big Thing doesn’t mean it actually is. You need to pay attention to whether the Big Thing needs infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet, understand that not everyone can press a button and become huge seemingly overnight, and be realistic about how many players the market space can actually support. BeIA failed on the first two counts—the iPad is, in most respects, what people meant by “internet appliance” at the turn of the century, but the iPad works because (nearly) everybody has wifi connected to high-speed data networks. In 1999, we didn’t. Right now we’re seeing a bubble around “social” and “gamification”—which I’ll probably write about again soon—which is, I suspect, going to fail on the last two counts.
Incidentally, there’s one mainstream program that survived the Bepocalypse: Anime Studio started out as Lost Marble’s BeOS animation program Moho.
