27 May
2000
27 May
'00
2:39 a.m.
On Sat, May 27, 2000 at 12:47:40AM -0400, Steve Mastrianni wrote:
But that's my point, OS/2 had that stuff back when Windows was still all
strangled with 64 KB segments (even on CPUs that supported 4 GB segs) and the
FAT file system and uncooperative single-tasking. And with applications too,
M$'s absolute 100% dominance is a pretty recent development. There used to
be piles of little application vendors before M$ killed them all, and plenty
of them released OS/2 versions of their stuff (or, it worked so well in the
compatibility boxes that there was no need). Customers don't care what
percentage of applications run on an OS, they care whether the applications
*they use* run on that OS. So an OS that runs less than 100% of the software
in the world doesn't automatically deserve a 0% market share. I mean why
the heck are Macs still around if so!
I mean, just a couple of years ago, most games would not run under Windows.
If you wanted games, you needed real live DOS. Yet M$ was somehow able to
convince everyone to abandon it anyway and start writing their games for
Windows, even though it had a bad rep among games users. How?! I'm just
amazed at how M$ continues to tell the whole world to stand on its head
and cluck like a chicken, and it actually works!
John Wilson
D Bit
>So I
don't get how they managed to lock out IBM.
Simple: its the apps. Businesses and individuals don't run operating
systems, they run applications. Trying to sell the OS on its merits as "the
integrating platform" was not enough. Sure, it could multitask DOS and
Windows apps, but users wanted much more than the old, tired real-mode
applications. The wanted a flat address space to run those huge apps, and a
file system with enough capacity to hold their giant databases.