[This is a fiction based on real events. Any similarity to actual people or machines will be... perhaps intentional.]

Like many other Be developers, StarCode Software jumped at the chance to develop for this new and exciting platform. The BeOS represents an intriguing mix of old and new. The Be interface is a strange blend of Windows, Macintosh, and even some UNIX interface ideas which seem to work well together. The stability and performance of preemptive multitasking and memory protection are a welcome change on the personal computer frontier. The small, flexible Be API is much less intimidating than the numerous "Inside Macintosh" volumes. The database and multimedia support are full of tremendous potential.

As many people were quick to point out, Be was crazy to try to build another OS when the world seems to embrace only a small handful of OSes. What Be had going for them, whether they knew it or not, was an OS that would appeal to a wide range of users, from geeks and hobbyists to multimedia designers. And with the introduction of the PowerMac port, Be has an opportunity to reach the mainstream.

Even though there's a lot of work left to be done on the OS and certain aspects of development are still frustrating, we should start seeing a change on the applications front over the next six months. Be is in a perfect position to aggressively track down great products from other platforms. Some areas where we see wonderful opportunities for small shops are: A hybrid resource/database editor, some memory/heap tracking tools, a news reader, and a graphical FTP client.

Located in Menlo Park, California, StarCode Software specializes in writing software management tools for the Be platform. We will be releasing the first version of our software installer, the Package Builder, during the second half of September. This is a critical step for developers to have a better tool than tar to distribute their software. Preliminary versions of the Package Builder will be free while we close in on a commercial quality product. (Feel free to suggest features and report bugs.)

Following the Package Builder, we will begin developing a second product, the Software Valet, which will help users spend less time managing their software and more time using it. Early versions will keep track of a user's installed applications (and concomitant software "packages"), thus allowing the user to easily and cleanly uninstall particular programs (for example). Later versions will track software compatibility, offer software upgrade assistance, and automate registration.

We're excited to bring these tools to the Be platform. For more information, send us e-mail at info@StarCode.com or check out our web site at http://www.StarCode.com. By the way, we're looking for another engineer. If you're interested, see the job announcement on our web site.

I well recall, in a reminiscence that will date me as a startup ancient, my painful technolust for the portable Z80- based CP/M machine called the Osborne 1. I saved up my L, s, and d in anticipation of purchasing my own Osborne 1—until Adam Osborne, the company's eponymous founder, announced the second-generation machine somewhat ahead of its shipment date, with the unfortunate effect that sales of the first product ground to a halt as everyone (myself included) waited for the newer, far superior, Osborne 2. The company failed and bequeathed its legacy to the computer industry:

Os-borne (Awz'born) vi. to cause a decrease in or elimination of sales of a product by announcing its replacement prematurely.

Despite this, companies continue to announce—or leak—information about new products before they are available. Sometimes this is simple misadventure, but there are other motives for early announcement, some pure, some not so pure.

• A company wishing to wage war on competitors with superior products may pre-announce its even more superior product to encourage customers to wait and not buy from the competition. Sometimes the even more superior product exists or is being developed. But not always.

• Companies with suboptimal products (a computer industry term for products that don't actually work very well, if at all) may announce a long-term future product that, of course, fixes all the deficiencies of the current one.

• A company wishing to gauge reactions to a product idea may announce the idea as an actual product in development. If enough orders arrive, maybe they'll build the product. Sometimes they even succeed.

• Some companies make the 16th century Tudor Courts seem calm, loyal, and altruistic by comparison: A rancorous faction within a company may make a premature announce- ment—and an implied commitment to customers—simply to lock the company into a particular direction.

• And, finally, some companies pre-announce products to keep their customers informed about future directions.

I'm prompted to write about Premature Announcement Syndrome because we may have unintentionally been unclear about the nature of two recent announcements: Our licensing of OpenGL® from Silicon Graphics and our agreement with Metrowerks to develop Java tools for the BeOS. Our intent was to inform about our future direction.

In both cases, our announcements met two important criteria: They were news and they were factual. We had indeed concluded a license agreement with Silicon Graphics and had indeed agreed with Metrowerks that they would develop Java tools for the BeOS. Neither was a product announcement, but both have been interpreted as such by some people. We apologize for the confusion. Our intent was, and still is, to indicate two important directions for the BeOS: That it will support the OpenGL® API, making the porting and development of OpenGL®-based applications much easier; and that we are planning to support Java, an important emerging language.

We'll announce both products when they ship, with a target for both of them late this year or early next year.

There are a number of reasons why I like Samuel Adams, or Boston Beer, the brewery. It makes excellent beers and, for Be, an excellent metaphor —a little outside my usual range perhaps, but an example of a well-run company that succeeds in a market dominated by giants. Recent events have rekindled my interest in the metaphor and also provided an answer to observers who kindly teased me by pointing to a flaw in the imagery.

The first event is a very nice story written by Steve Kaufman, a staff writer at the San Jose "Mercury News." The piece appeared September 9 and, thanks to the net, was brought to my attention by friends over in France. Titled "Companies Putting the 'Public' Back into IPOs," the column describes how companies such as Boston Beer or Starbuck Coffee make sure small individual investors do not get shut out of "public" offerings. Boston Beer allocated 20 percent of the 4.5-million-share offering to customers who called for a prospectus and the opportunity to buy shares at $15 each. What's remarkable isn't that shares still trade above the IPO price (quote symbol SAM: $21 today), it's that Jim Koch, Boston Beer's CEO, took the extra pain and money required to include consumers in the IPO. It took an extra shot of pain in dealing with the SEC, getting their approval, writing a special consumers-only prospectus, and spending over a million dollars in the process. Apparently, this was money wisely invested. The consumer/shareholders turned out to be Boston Beer's best promoters, they got cards identifying them as Boston Beer co-owners and everywhere they went, demanded to know why the store or the restaurant they were in wasn't carrying Samuel Adams beer.

This isn't the way most companies do IPOs. In order to get stock in a hot IPO, you need friends in high places. Either at the company or in one of the firms handling the new issue. The little guy stands outside that cozy network and only gets to buy after the insiders and their cronies made their profits on the initial rise. Too bad if the stock falls back not only from the early apex, but also below the offering price, as it did often in recent hyped-up offerings.

This is not a new phenomenon. In 1980, I got a call from Aaron Orlhansky, a financial analyst from a US brokerage house located in Paris. We used to meet for lunch, he brought press releases and prospectuses, I interpreted the technical jargon, and he picked up the tab. One day, by way of thanking me for pointing Tandem to him, he offered to get me stock in the upcoming IPO of Apple Computer. I declined, preferring to stick with my small Tandem position. He also mentioned that Tom Lawrence, then Apple's VP of European Operations, was looking for someone to start Apple France. This time, I bit.

Back to Boston Beer, I used to like the company because it made an excellent case for both contrarian wisdom and plain old good execution. Back in the seventies, the Boston Consulting Group and their brethren sold concepts such as "forward pricing" and "size is everything". As a result, we witnessed ugly copulations of large corporate bodies, megaconcentrations in the food, tobacco, and beverage businesses. Anheuser Busch bought competitors, Philip Morris bought Miller breweries, and we got corporate beer, beer designed by committee, indifferent beer. Less taste, more filling. On the consumers' taste buds, this left room for more interesting beers. Microbreweries, an old pioneer tradition, started to rise, so to speak. We got mediocre beer, so-so beer, and great beer. Boston Beer rose from nowhere, initially with little support from the financial community, with no manufacturing plant. But their beer consistently won taste contests. They contracted capacity from other breweries, stayed in control of the taste, the quality, and the cost, and initially marketed the hell out of their product at beer festivals and other connoisseur venues. Samuel Adams and the other fine microbrews became so successful the giants woke up irritated and confused. Their response? Imitation. By carefully reading the label of one such ersatz, you'll find it's made under a license from a French industrial brewery. The same attention to a Plank Road label will reveal it comes from the makers of Miller Lite.

I was introduced to Boston Beer by one of our founders, Steve Sakoman, home brewer himself, who felt Samuel Adams was one of the few commercial brews worthy of real beer makers and drinkers. So, after metabolizing a few pints, I started metaphorizing. Boston Beer and Jim Koch became one of the examples that inspired our work. That was long before they went public. Not only did Boston Beer execute well against conventional wisdom, but when the time came for a hot IPO, they also treated their consumer/shareholders warmly and creatively. Reading Steve Kaufman's column made me feel we had indeed picked a good model.

What about the flaw in the imagery, then? Astute observers remarked this microbrewery metaphor bucking contrarian thought was well and good, but all beers are compatible with the installed base of refrigerators and bottle openers. Our beer needed not just taste buds tired of legacy brews, but also different refrigerators and bottle openers. It just occurred to me that with the PowerMac port of the BeOS we might have found nice standard fridges and church keys.

BeDevTalk is an unmonitored discussion group in which technical information is shared by Be developers and interested parties. In this column, we summarize some of the active threads, listed by their subject lines as they appear, verbatim, in the mail.

To subscribe to BeDevTalk, visit the mailing list page on our web site: http://www.be.com/aboutbe/mailinglists.html.