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[画像:800px os2w4.png]It's a story as old as Amiga.
Desperate to own the platform, Motorola is busy hiring up ex-Apple and Adobe engineers in an effort to build the next great Web-based mobile operating system.
Over the past nine months, Motorola has been hiring engineering talent that would well-suited to create a new mobile operating system.
Its team appears to include a significant number of ex-Apple and Adobe personnel, including Gilles Drieu, VP of software engineering at Motorola Mobility, Benoit Marchant, director of engineering at Motorola Mobility, and Sean Kranzberg, also a director of engineering at Motorola Mobility.
Motorola is, of course, not the first company desperate to offer an operating system to rival Microsoft and Apple.
Google is actually working on two operating systems: Android for mobile and Chrome for netbooks.
In fact, there's a long history of defunct or ignored operating systems for Motorola to pick through.
We've collected just a few here.
Many of these operating systems were plenty innovative in their time.
Where they each ran into trouble was either struggling to sell to anybody other than a few early adopters, or failing to evolve as their businesses changed.
Year created: 1985
Company: Commodore
What happened? Ars Technica put it best when in 2005, it wrote: "The Amiga computer was a machine ahead of its time. When it was released in 1985, its color screen (4096 colors in HAM mode!), four-channel sampled stereo sound, preemptive multitasking GUI, and custom chips to accelerate both sound and graphics made the year-old Macintosh seem antiquated and the PC positively Paleolithic. Steve Jobs was reported to be extremely worried about the Amiga, but fortunately for him and Apple, Commodore had absolutely no idea what they were doing."
Year created: 1991
Company: Be Inc.
What happened? Apple offered to buy Be Inc for 125ドル million in 1995, but CEO Jean-Louis Gassée wanted 200ドル million. Apple bought Steve Jobs's NeXT instead, and Palm acquired the company's assets for 11ドル million in 2001.
Year created: 1985
Company: IBM
What happened? Microsoft and IBM joined to create OS/2 in 1985, but when Windows 3 became a huge hit, the partnership unraveled in 1990. Though no longer supported by IBM, the operating system still runs on many ATMs today.
Year created: 1987
Company: Acorn Computers Ltd
What happened? Developed in five months, Arthur was supposed to be a short-term scab, but it stuck around until the RISC OS was developed in 1989. That operating system is still in use, but we don't know anyone who uses it.
Year created: ~1996
Company: Linux desktops are open source.
What happened? 2010 is almost certain to be the year of desktop Linux. Just like 2009. And 2008. And...
Year created: 1996
Company: Bell Labs
What happened? It's an open source operating system, so there are versions of it still out there. But they don't work above the basement floor.
Year created: 1992
Company: BAE Systems
What happened? Valued for their security, this operating system and its successors are still used in military technology.
Year created: 1996
Company: Palm Inc.
What happened? In 2002, Palm spun the OS out as its own company. Innovation pretty much ended there and what was once a very strong pioneering OS for PDAs, couldn't keep up when it came to the Web and multimedia.
Year created: 1998
Company: Ericsson
What happened? UIQ went into bankruptcy this year after the Symbian Foundation chose to base future user-interfaces on the S60 OS.
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