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

To: BillHoo who wrote (45651)	5/30/2000 3:34:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Bill - an interesting footnote to the OS/2 discussion - there was little support for Windows development inside MSFT and in fact most of the top executives saw it as at best a transition product for the DOS base to get to OS/2. The Windows team had almost no resources and lost every architectural battle. When Dave Cutler started working on NT in 1988, it was mostly an effort to show that MSFT could develop a "real" OS, and was proposed as the next generation of OS/2, not a competitor. IBM did not see it that way - especially the part about MSFT doing serious OS development. Despite the lack of resources and executive mindshare, Windows 3.0 was a breakthrough product - the first version of Windows that was actually usable. The APIs were also decent, and I developed a number of Windows apps for 3.0. I never paid any attention to previous versions of Windows. Even after the launch of 3.0, MSFT top management still did not take Windows seriously, and their goal was to get OS/2 smaller and more compatible. That battle raged in the 1.2 and 1.3 revs of OS/2, with MSFT fielding a different version than IBM. The MSFT version, "OS/2 on a diet", would run well in 2MB while the IBM version needed 4MB and was really only happy with 8MB. This happened at a time when Reagan's tariff policy against Japanese memory had driven RAM prices through the roof, and an 8MB machine cost nearly twice as much as a machine with 2MB. It was that issue, more than Windows, which drove the split. After it became obvious that IBM and MSFT would go separate ways, MSFT finally got serious about Windows - it was the only horse they had. Prior to that, NT would have supported SAA and presentation manager, but after, was reworked to support the Windows design. NT also supported HPFS, the OS/2 file system, in the first few versions. I was not connected with any of the Win95 or later development work but it would surprise me if any OS/2 thinking was influential, there were just not any people who had much to do with that end of OS/2 at MSFT, and there is also a lot of "NIH" at MSFT, as you may have noticed...