There is a lot of emotion people have in a question like this.
I think the best answer is BeOS wasn't as complete as NeXT. Specifically it had a fairly poor network stack (it was being retooled around the time BeOS became part of palm, no idea if it was finished)
It lacked the kind of print support MacOS and NeXT had. It lacked the same caliber of internationalization. All fixable stuff but also all stuff requiring some investment.
It also remains to be seen how well BeOS would actually scale, it was an RTOS with a UI, it could absolutely do sexy stuff on low powered machines of the day, that doesn't mean it could run a 12core dual i7 machine well. Maybe it could, we really don't know.
iZ Corporation's RADAR runs on BeOS. It's a DAW system of exceedingly high quality. We can only guess how well it'd scale, but Be looks to me not to be the sort of software that helps sell hardware.
I think the best answer is BeOS wasn't as complete as NeXT. Specifically it had a fairly poor network stack (it was being retooled around the time BeOS became part of palm, no idea if it was finished)
It lacked the kind of print support MacOS and NeXT had. It lacked the same caliber of internationalization. All fixable stuff but also all stuff requiring some investment.
It also remains to be seen how well BeOS would actually scale, it was an RTOS with a UI, it could absolutely do sexy stuff on low powered machines of the day, that doesn't mean it could run a 12core dual i7 machine well. Maybe it could, we really don't know.