  Most discussions of supersymmetric grand unified theories assume universality
of the soft supersymmetry breaking terms at the grand scale. We point out that
the behaviour of these theories might change significantly in the presence of
non--universal soft terms. Particularly in SO(10)--like models with a large
value of tan$\beta$ we observe a decisive change of predictions, allowing the
presence of relatively light gauginos as well as small supersymmetric
corrections to the b--quark mass. Some results remain rather stable, including
the $\mu$--$M_{1/2}$ correlation. Models with small tan$\beta$ seem to be less
affected by non--universality which mainly leads to the new possibility of
small $m_{0}$ (i.e. the squark and slepton soft mass parameter), excluded in
the universal case.
