He wore tailored suits when necessary, but he often addressed employees wearing a black (lambskin) leather jacket and a single diamond-stud earring.
[citation needed] When the idea of licensing the Mac OS for other companies use was brought up by various members of Apple, Jean-Louis refused to give in to the idea, maintaining that the Macintosh was more powerful than any other computer at the present, and had a superior architectural roadmap for future expansion than any other computer.
[citation needed] Shortly afterward, Gassée ordered a paperback copy of Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month for all product-development employees, in the hope of inspiring good sense in project management.
Brooks gave a lecture at nearby De Anza College: the room was filled with Apple employees with copies of his book, who told him stories that confirmed his conclusions.
The employee, well aware of Apple's rules on divulging trade secrets to the press, succinctly explained the issues.
In 1989, Gassée successfully killed a Claris project, 'Drama', which aimed to start a new brand to sell low-end Macintosh computers.
In 1991, Gassée started a new venture, Be Inc., with the ambitious goal of creating an entire new computer platform, hardware and software, from the ground up.
In 1996, Apple Computer decided to abandon Copland, the project to rewrite and modernize the Macintosh operating system.
While it arguably never grew past a cult following, it sold enough copies to have a nascent development and user community, and had several thousand programs available for it, including several dozen commercial products.
[citation needed] While there was vendor interest in BeIA and at least one shipping product based on it (the Sony eVilla), the market for internet appliances proved to be nearly non-existent, and Be laid off most of its employees in 2001, with its assets and the remaining engineers being bought by Palm, Inc. for $11 million that August.
In 2009, he started contributing regularly to the Monday Note blog, a newsletter covering the intersection of media and technology which is now a part of Medium.