Be, Inc., the company founded by former Apple executive Jean Louis Gassee, has been acquired by Palm for US$11 million in common stock. The company is best known in the Mac space for the BeOS, an alternative operating system that ran on Macs and that many saw as a possible successor to the Mac OS. After Apple’s acquisition of NeXT in 1998, the company shifted its BeOS efforts to the Intel platform, where it failed to achieve any significant following. More recently, the company’s BeIA integrated operating system has been attracting niche markets, such as Sony’s eVilla Web device.