I accept some of the points you make about the IBM's intended market for OS/2
and the fact that they are a suppliers of business machines. But we live in a world
where the PC is dominant, even in those favoured customers of IBM. However good
micro channel is, unless the general user can be persuaded of its benefits there
will be insufficient sales of the better product in the overall market place.
That IBM miscalculated what would happen to the PC is on a par with the statement
that there was only a need for one super-computer in the world. The real trouble
is that IBM is too inflexible and too slow at coping with the fast changing market
place.
So far as OS/2 is concerned many people working for IBM's target companies will
want the same system at home as at work, and many of the home users are in a position
to influence what is bought at work. What is a small company today by IBM's standards
could be the giant of tomorrow. (look what happened to microsoft!)
I think it would be a tragedy if you do ignore SOHO users. Apart from anything
else there has to be an alternative to windows. The sort of monopoly microsoft is
close to achieving will not be good for IBM even in its target area and will be
a disaster for the rest of us.
I don't know enough much about the American Constitution but I am pretty sure
that discrimination against people because of race, colour, religion etc is not
approved of. Discrimination against a class of user, just because they are too small
in number to suit a particular Company's business needs seems to me to be contrary
to the spirit of your Constitution if not actually illegal. --
A happy home user of Warp4
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@jayell@mcmail.com (John Lewis)
9 Iwerne Close, Bournemouth, Dorset, DH9 3PW, U.K.
(01202) 779450
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Reply to the above from David Both, President of VOICE:
Thank you for your comments. We do appreciate the time you took to express your
thoughts.
Discrimination against a class of user is not illegal. If it were, all of the
major software packages would have OS/2 versions!
I agree with your comments about IBM. They are slow and, in my opinion, ignorant
of the PC market which they single-handedly created. Unfortunately creating a market
and being able to exploit it are totally different aspects of a free market economy.
The Wright brothers invented the airplane - or rather some of the key technology
required to build a workable airplane - but not a single aircraft company in the
world makes "Wright" airplanes. Good inventors, lousy businessmen.
As for the home PC - I suspect that we will not only see a different way of taking
work home as ADSL becomes more common, and rather than having a PC at home running
the same apps and OS, we will see NET PCs or some equivalent at home for corporate
users to enable telecommuting or work from home in the evenings.
I think the OS and apps we use at home will diverge significantly from those
we use at work and that the home platform will by comparison be trivial or totally
irrelevant. Home PCs will be for games, web surfing, and home finance. The driving
force behind the home and office technologies are driving them apart. One is heavily
oriented to connectivity technologies and the other towards multimedia technologies.
And the spirit of our constitution welcomes all users, home or business.
David Both
Thank you for extending hope for those of us who are tired of fighting both IBM
and the MS megalith. I am a rarity: I bought warp 3 at the initial release and still
use it. I'm presently up to FP32.
If IBM could only see that 100,000 soho users are a larger group than ANY of
the fortune 2000 companies, then perhaps we could make some headway.
However, I removed Warp from my system last night. I'm tired of drivers and install
programs that don't work. I have no local users group, and know of no other users
locally. Unless Stardock can persuade IBM to license OS/2, I probably will stop
using it permanently.
I am love the power and stability as well as the relatively modest hw requirements
of Warp. I just can't go on alone.
Tim Herrington
Response to above from the editor:
I don't think you are a rarity. A lot of people are still running Warp 3.0 and
are beginning to run into some of the problems you are encountering with outdated
drivers and lack of PnP support. We OS/2 users have always had to work at keeping
our systems running, since most hardware support is in the hands of IBM instead
of the hardware vendors. I have cursed OS/2 my self on occasion, but I have never
gone to windows. I see the problems others have with their wintendo systems and
I come back to my senses and work on through my problems with the resources we do
have. The OS/2 community has become very self supportive with lots of help available
on usenet and in the mail lists and on the web. I hope you will do the same, but
if you can't then good luck with what ever replacement for OS/2 you find. And remember
this is not a religion or a matter of national pride. If things don't work out,
you can always come back to OS/2.
Dear editor,
I have some questions?
>From your story I understand that large businesses began to move away from OS/2
because they thought that IBM was abandoning them. First of all I don't understand
that IBM couldn't serve both markets. You just make 2 divisions. Second, to where
were large business moving away from OS/2? To Unix? Not that bad? To Windows? How
is that possible? And they probably will come back.
Quote:
"If we are business users, then we must begin to act like it. Our membership
must include Information Technology people in large companies. We must appeal to
network administrators and IT executives. We must become a VOICE for those who SHOULD
make the technology decisions in the enterprise. Our target market, as VOICE, should
be the same people for whom IBM is targeting OS/2. If we do not recognize that,
we are doomed to fail. I am not saying we should abandon the SOHO market, just that
we, as IBM, must target the business market."
To my opinion it is almost impossible to sell the best product of the market.
Nobody knows the product, because they don't use it at home. The neighbour doesn't
use it either. IBM doesn't use it. They try to sell Windows NT. The product is dead,
isn't it? It seemed to be something like Video 2000? I know better but I hope you
understand that I don't want to seem ridiculous for my customers? I sincerely hope
that IBM will sell OS/2 to a real "selling company" Then probably I can
advice it for customers.
nt
Response to the above from the editor:
I wish I knew the answers to your questions. My personal feelings are that I
don't care if OS/2 is not the most popular personal computing operating system.
Unfortunately few developers are willing to continue to support a shrinking market.
Eventually we'll all have to move on to something else. That is inevitable no matter
what OS you are running as technology continues to evolve. I can guarantee that
won't be windows9x, since that will be really dead before OS/2 breathes it's last
breath.
There is a thriving shareware market for OS/2 and Java apps are beginning to
appear in growing numbers. The win32-OS/2 project is now in open beta and will hopefully
open up more software availability for OS/2 users These options will allow most
of us to keep running OS/2 for quite a while if we choose to do so. Hopefully IBM
will come to it's senses and decide they can make more money by actually producing
products instead of just servicing MickeySoft's installs.