As has been OS/2's turbulent history, it has its good days and it's bad days. Thanks
in large part to bizarre marketing (or mostly lack there of) from IBM, the news
has been generally bad of late. In an interview in the February issue of EDM/2 online
magazine - http://www.edm2.com/0602/index.html
with IBM spokespersons Stephanie Rasmussen and John Albee, it was made clear that
IBM has no interest in the SOHO/individual OS/2 user market. This is not exactly
news, since IBM has said they were targeting the Fortune 2000 mega corporations
and recently reorganized OS/2 under a new networking division. The bad news is that
IBM continues it's myopic ways, placing all their eggs in the single basket of Work
Space on Demand, saying "Anyone interested in moving to OS/2 on the desktop
should be a customer looking to implement network computing in a managed PC environment
through WorkSpace On-Demand."
The good news is that Stardock http://www.stardock.com
has said that if IBM is not interested in the individual, small business OS/2 desktop
market, then they are. In the February issue of Stardock magazine, Brad Wardell
stated, "Stardock also plans to approach IBM about Stardock marketing an enhanced
version of OS/2 specifically to the SOHO market." Hopefully these enhancements
will include much needed improvements like a real fix for the SIQ problem, SMP support
in the client and a real marketing campaign. The best part of this is that Stardock
can go to all the software developers and hardware manufacturers that IBM has alienated,
and encourage them to once again support OS/2. As a member of VOICE I look forward
to helping Stardock or anyone else who can succeed in this plan to license and market
OS/2 to the power user and small business user.
Finally, even though I don't use any windows apps, it is nice to see that the win32-OS/2
project http://www.io.com/~timur/win32os2.html
is progressing rapidly. They have successfully converted Quake II and are now looking
to test other win32 applications. If you have a particular app that you would like
to see run under OS/2, they are asking for contributions of licensed, commercial
windows software. This one project will probably do more to generate interest in
OS/2 then anything that has been tried in the past couple of years, since IBM failed
to follow up on it's success of Warp 3.0. As has been the case with Win-OS/2 relative
to Windows 3.1, OS/2 will again be a better win32 platform then the MicroSoft versions.