Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William Chaney who wrote (33423)	11/9/1999 1:19:00 PM
From: The Duke of URL©	Respond to of 74651

William: >> OS/2 flopped, all right, but it wasn't PS/2 specific, at least for ver. 2.1, which was what I started with about 1991-2 on a locally built 486 clone. << That would fit. IBM just did not cease the efforts on os2 after Microsoft quit the joint development. They continued to produce it, and do so to this day. It was the "P/S2 that went bye, bye. I seem to remember that they had a 1000 engineers working on it. If they could have perfected it, it still might have detroyed MSFT and given them back the PC business thru the back door. Once it would have been accepted as the standand, they could always make it incompatable later. Nobody was buying it. (the concept, I mean:)) The only thing IBM could do was to make it generic, to save the product. >>IBM's hesitancy to define the product clearly was an important factor in its inability to become a viable OS for the market. << IBM never cared about o/s2. They were a hardware company and the real original purpose of os2 was to sell hardware. When they discovered the "grand plan" had been discovered by the consumer, ie that the consumer was not going to buy into the multibuck upgrade path...well you can well imagine their lack of enthusiasm and hence the lack of desire to define the product. Duke

To: William Chaney who wrote (33423)	11/9/1999 1:40:00 PM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Win-OS/2 also played a pretty big role. Once it was possible for OS/2 to do a decent job running Windows apps, the incentive for ISVs to develop PM-based apps kind of evaporated. Vendor after vendor abandonded any plans they ever had to go OS/2 native. Probably some of the best OS/2 support in the 2.1 timeframe came from Word Perfect, in that they had a little utility you could get off their BBS that made it easier to launch the Windows version of Word Perfect from Presentation Manager. Even IBM never saw much point in dumping any money on PM versions of the Smart Suite applications once they bought Lotus. OS/2 was without a doubt a "better DOS than DOS", but it never came close to being a "better Windows than Windows". Once the primary thing one could do with OS/2 on the desktop was run Windows applications (OS/2 remained a kick-ass server for some time), it was kind of difficult to find the point of continuing to use it; all it did was get in one's way. After a while you couldn't even get OS/2 with Win-OS/2 bundled, so you had to go buy a copy of Windows to make it work, thus removing the incentive of even the rabid anti-MS crowd, leaving only the companies who had painted their doors blue and really didn't give a crap about Windows apps to keep OS/2 from a final death. Solid binary compatibility between competing operating systems is one of the last steps along the way for the death of whichever one holds the inferior applications base. Watch how well SCO's new ability to run Linux applications will help it maintain it's market share. Not. Solaris X86 is kind of in the same boat; watch the few ISVs selling Solaris X86 apps abandon that OS in droves as the Linux compatibility gets better. --Bob