I was another former Be "power user." And I think that was probably accurate -- if you weren't in the "BeOS lifestyle" during the admittedly short window that it was possible, it's hard to understand how much promise it looked like it had. When I tell people I ran it full-time for over a year, they wonder how I managed to get anything done, but...<p>- Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac<p>- GoBe Productive was comparable to AppleWorks, but maybe a little better at being compatible with Microsoft Office<p>- SoundPlay was a great MP3 player that could do crazy things that I still don't see anything doing 20 years later (it had speed control for files, including playing backwards, and could <i>mix</i> files that were queued up for playback; it didn't have any library management, but BeOS's file system let you expose arbitrary metadata -- like MP3 song/artist/etc. tags! -- right in file windows)<p>- Mail-It was the second-best email client I ever used, behind the now also sadly-defunct Mailsmith<p>- e-Picture was an object-based bitmapped graphics editor similar in spirit and functionality to Macromedia's Fireworks, and was something I genuinely missed for years after leaving BeOS<p>And there were other programs that were amazing, even though I didn't use them: Adamation's video editor (videoElements? something like that), their audio editor audioElements, Steinberg's Nuendo, objektSynth, and two programs which are incredibly still being sold today: Lost Marble's Moho animation program, now sold by Smith Micro for Mac and PC, and the radio automation package TuneTracker (incredibly now being sold as a turnkey bundle with Haiku). Also, for years, there was a professional-grade theatre light/audio control system, LCS CueStation, that ran on BeOS -- and it actually ran Broadway and Las Vegas productions. I remember seeing it running at the Cirque de Soleil permanent installation at Disney World in Orlando.<p>At the time Apple bought Next rather than Be, I thought they'd made a horrible mistake. Given Apple's trajectory afterward, of course, it's hard to say that looking back. It's very possible that if they'd bought Be, they'd have gone under, although I think that would have less to do with technology than with the management they'd have ended up with (or more accurately, stayed with). But it's still an interesting "what if."