Be Inc is now ready to talk about the investment from Intel Corp it received back in April – reported by us at the time (CI No 3,377). The official announcement is expected to be made at Comdex in Las Vegas this week, along with the launch of the latest version of BeOS, the company’s media operating system. Intel engineers have been working with Be for some time porting and optimizing BeOS to run on Intel chips. It originally ran only on PowerPC architectures. The first Intel version came out back in February (CI No 3,343). Intel’s funding – as usual an undisclosed sum – was part of the giant $25m round of private funding Be secured in April. While some are interpreting the announcement as an anti-Microsoft move – especially when put aside Intel’s recent similar investment in Linux developer Red Hat Software Inc, and the unflattering light shed on the Intel/Microsoft partnership in Washington last week – BeOS has been making it clear for some time that its policy is to coincide with Microsoft operating systems in multi-boot installations rather than replace it. That’s how Hitachi Ltd, the first company to pre-install BeOS on a desktop computer, plans to offer the system on its Flora Prius PC aimed at the Japanese market (CI No 3,538). On that machine, users get a choice on which system to boot up. Reports suggest that there is another OEM set to announce BeOS products by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the new BeOS 4.0 actually makes some concessions to Windows compatibility, including support for Windows disk formats and a client for Microsoft networks enabling users to connect to, read from and write to NT servers and Windows machines. The new version also adds a new media kit for specifying complex series of operations performed on streaming media, expanded hardware support for devices such as soundcards, display adapters, network interface cards and video capture boards, and performance improved by up to 30%, according to Be. Price will be $100, but there is an introductory price of $70.
