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

To: Bob Drzyzgula who wrote (33432)	11/9/1999 2:33:00 PM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

cbs.marketwatch.com

To: Bob Drzyzgula who wrote (33432)	11/9/1999 3:12:00 PM
From: William Chaney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

>>>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. This was a basic problem that IBM never was able to solve. By providing backward compatibility with DOS/Windows programs (which they needed to do) at the time that this was MS's only offering (1991-95), IBM created a situation where vendors has less incentive to develop OS/2-based applications since Windows-based applications could work on OS/2 and DOS/Windows. MS did a good job of convincing journalists that there wasn't any compelling functional advantage to going to a new operating system until, of course, they reversed course when Win95 was ready. At this point, MS and other applications vendors then sold "upgrades" to Win95. >>>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. I think that this isn't accurate. Even the latest version of OS/2, Warp 4.0, includes Win-OS/2. IBM did sell a version without Windows included that was designed to work with pre-installed Windows 3.1. This was to avoid having to pay another fee to MS for Windows when the computer that it was going on already had DOS/Windows installed. In retrospect, they might have been better off selling only this version with the idea that the user would load it on top of the DOS/Windows already on their computer, keeping their existing system and adding new functionality on top. Of course, that falls under the category of 20-20 hindsight. Wm Chaney

To: Bob Drzyzgula who wrote (33432)	11/9/1999 4:18:00 PM
From: RTev	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

OS/2 was without a doubt a "better DOS than DOS", but it never came close to being a "better Windows than Windows". Yup. The GUI history gets mixed with the rest. Microsoft made a leap of faith in what was an unproven technology. Microsoft recognized the value of Apple's Xerox-derived GUI right away, when the mass of the computer industry (including IBM) saw it as little more than an interesting toy. As I recall, IBM was late in bringing out Presentation Manager for OS/2. I don't remember all of the subplots that led to the dissolution of the IBM/MS development partnership for OS/2, but I recall that a very buggy Windows version was ready long before PM was usable. That delay (along with the technologically unfortunate, but market-approved compatibility with the old DOS) gave Microsoft time it needed to improve Windows and to attract other applications vendors like Aldus from the Mac camp over to Windows, and to convert their own Mac applications to Windows. Both Lotus and WordPerfect failed to anticipate consumer's acceptance of the GUI interface. Along with IBM, they put their faith in the "better DOS than DOS". Microsoft, on the other hand, recognized that the market would accept and even embrace the less-than-ideal underlying system if consumers were able to continue using existing applications while slowly moving to a significantly richer environment with new kinds of applications.