They tried buying BeOS, but the BeOS people absolutely refused to sell out to a company like Apple. NeXT was their second choice, and they succeeded in buying it (NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X).
IIRC, Jean-Louis Gassée named a price that Apple was unwilling to pay. I don't know his motivation for doing that - was it all about the money? Or was it to stick it to Apple and name a stratospheric price as a way of sending a message?
Jean-Louis Gassée is an ex-Apple executive. He's why Jobs left Apple. For him the point of Be Inc. was to show Apple they'd been wrong to subsequently get rid of him in 1990.
When Apple were looking at BeOS / NeXT what they were really trying to decide was whether to have Jobs or Gassée back. They picked Jobs.
After Be, Inc. sank JLG arranged to run Palm's software spin-off. This produced the version of PalmOS that's remarkable because instead of being used more palmtop devices than previous PalmOS versions it was used in none at all, even the Palm hardware company never used it.
IMO Gassée would be nobody you've heard of if not for the fact of his being in a position to force Jobs out of Apple. Everything else follows from that.
