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Letters, Addendum, Errata

One specific thing in the m$soft trial was that IBM got a last minute license for win95 and less than top level good guy support from m$soft. Also M$soft almost got them to not support os/2 if they wanted to get win95.

My thought is that IBM got so burned on the lost revenue due to the late license availability of win95 that they became one of the early adopters of win2000 to assure themselves of a better pricing structure/service level even at the height of the anti-trust trial to cut the hemorrhaging of their pc division losses as stated earlier in this e-zine and the finding of fact. A real reality check of having to do what ya gotta do for the monopoly operating system until all the appeals and re-trials run their course. You still have to consider the bottom line until then. Remember IBM First......well now IBM has seemingly buckled into M$soft totally to help the bottom line..an understandable reality... anything else would result in a probable stockholders revolt in the environment of a mainstream ,bluechip, conservative company...., more completely than when m$soft tried to demand the same kind of compliance a few years ago..a time period when the justice department suit is concerned about. This is likely to be interpreted as a complete reversal to insure that there is now way of a repeat performance of the past lockout of revenue streams they experienced during the release of win95. After all we are only 10 - 15 million individual and SOHO users .............BEOS would probably love to have that many....linux is not focused there even though some evangelist want to make it a wannebe... quite frankly only os/2 serves the user as a whole is a knowledgeable computer user who wants a tool..a work appliance. It does not address the techno-geek that linux seems to require to get full utilization. When I look at warp4 out of the package I see a stable operating system that had bonus pak applications that allowed you to perform tasks that would have taken additional downloading if you chose the default win95 to become the equal to what you had available from the gitgo....heck warp 4 included voice activation an add on feature for win95 that cost more than os/2 just to get one feature of it's functionality even today m$soft is still seemingly struggling to develop this inhouse....or do the usual m$soft innovation technology..buy it!!!

After all my wife runs win95 to run the graphic applications she uses to develop outstanding graphics she shares with many friends she has, I do not begrudge her that, it works for her and that is fine. But it galls me when m$soft wants to try to indirectly dictate my choice of os to do what I want to do with MY computer.....that is wrong. Personally to me any winxx product is the moral equivalent of AOL....the easily installable or default ....the somewhat slick looking but severely hampered by the spam the unwanted advertisements worse than any anti-billboard ordinance could imagine, the acceptance of the lowest common denominator. I reserve the right not to go there......and I ought to have that right and choice to do so. I sit here today running os/2 with the bonus apps doing almost everything I chose to do with my computer. In the past I ran a bbs(bulletin board system) with 9 telephone lines under dos and later os/2. I have worked in the past designing gate array chips, so I am not a computer newbie..but more that anything else I am an OS/2 user an ,IBM customer and someone who has been told that further support form IBM will be at a charge. Somehow I have to believe that when that turn of events occurred, Billy G. had to have had a smug smile cross his face when he read that little thread of information amongst all he reads...... Let me conclude with this ...I am an os/2 user..it works for me...I don't demand others use it..I am quite frankly to old to crusade for a new os...I like what I have and I wish to be able to work with my chosen os and those programs developers choose to make available to me to accomplish my tasks. I do not want to have developers choosing not to develop for my os because of fear of the dominant os in the market and pressures they may apply. Also I do not want a monopoly company trying to alter standards with extensions or non-compliant structures to inhibit free development of user usable software in order to make something m$softable just to make it so and to stall off the better sense thing of conforming to the adopted standard.....Imagine if you will if every telephone exchange implemented a different to transfer conversations in a proprietary manner..where would we be today. At the moment for myself personally there is only one small area that is lacking in os/2 and that is streaming media. M$soft invested in RealAudio and then developed MediaPlayer for windows...Real Player is a common standard for viewing of news multimedia headline presentation....it is an os/2 weak area right now and hopefully will be corrected soon.

ps: I bought os/2..I want to run it..I like it...IBM ARE YOU LISTENING???????????

To date we have received only four replies of interest in Mr. Dobson's proposal. Appears to me the OS/2 community either has no interest in this project, or no funds to risk in any attempt to help guide IBM back to supporting it's own products. Either way four or five people could not possibly make this work.