Comment by machinecoffee

I would argue that BeOS was not a failure as an OS, but it was a failure in the market where it couldn't find a clear place for itself, and was attempting to break into a market pretty much totally dominated by MS at the time.

Remember in the time of home computers, there were many good Systems that were pretty much from scratch implementations (Amiga, GEM and Archimedes) so the idea of creating a totally new OS against the incumbents (Windows and OSX) is not totally pointless.