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The larger story of Be has its roots firmly set in the soil of Apple's rich mythology. In this context, the company's founding is the second great exodus of Apple engineers (the first being Steve Jobs' ouster in 1986 and his subsequent founding of NeXT). In 1990, John Sculley fired Gassée, then head of Apple engineering and Sculley's right-hand man. A few days after his departure, Gassée founded Be -- and soon after was joined by disgusted Apple engineers like Ringwalde, creator of the "Pink" project that was supposed to have been Apple's next cutting-edge OS. Ringwalde left after Apple dumped over 100 engineers on the project and mired it in its own org chart.

With experiences like these, the two men and their compatriots took it upon themselves to make their new company the Anti-Apple. Gassée, whom Jim Carlton scathingly portrays in his book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" as the man who fought tooth and nail against licensing the Mac OS, admits today that he was wrong -- but says that by the time he was in power, he had no control over the situation.

"What Apple had and still has is a hardware addiction. And they can't pull the needle," Gassée says. "There was no question for me that we [here at Be] could get rid of the hardware addiction because we had not been intoxicated enough. It's not a question of belief, like when you make licensing a religious point. We did it for business reasons."

So Be dumped its early hardware effort -- known as the BeBox -- and will now license its OS to anyone. It even posted a bare-bones version of its Preview Release to the Internet, downloadable for free. Carlton sees this as a perfect example of what differentiates Gassée and the rest of Be's leadership from a future competitor like Apple's Jobs. "This willingness to admit fault is a key personality trait that sets Jean-Louis apart from the truly megalomaniacal Steve Jobs," Carlton says. "As far as I can tell, Jobs has never admitted a major mistake in his life."

On the software side, Ringwalde has kept his OS team the way he likes it, small -- small enough that the core functions of the operating system have been developed by only eight engineers. And unlike Apple, he says, "The culture here breeds a number of supercapable, efficiently minded engineers. There's a lot of arrogance in larger companies. All the years I worked at Apple, I considered it a fairly arrogant place. I mean, we would think to ourselves 'We built the MacOS!' Unfortunately, that was about all they built. In a small company like Be, though, where we have to prove ourselves, we don't have that yet."

"I don't think that the passing of a mantle from Apple to Be is anything any of us think about," Ringwalde adds.

Be's leaders talk so much about their own humility that they almost seem, paradoxically, proud of it. Once, when asked what the difference between Be and Jobs' ill-fated NeXT was, Gassée replied, "We don't shit on our developers." Stephen Adams, CEO of Adamation Inc., a former NeXT developer that's now making applications for Be, agrees. "You were either a favorite son or you weren't with NeXT. Be is cut from the same cloth as its developers. They started as a humble company, which I think came from Jean-Louis when he left Apple. They've learned from its mistakes, and that learning process is very endemic in their culture."

Humility may be enough to win respect from developers and loyalty from customers. But can it build a successful business in the notoriously brutal operating-system marketplace? Is there a niche for a fast, sleek, ultramodern -- yet humble -- OS with neither Bill Gates' growing fortune nor Apple's dwindling faithful on its side? We'll start to know the answer, beginning next week.
SALON | March 4, 1998

Greg Lindsay is a contributing editor at Netly News.