On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 20:55 -0500, William Donzelli wrote:
Oh,
please. OS/2 NEVER took off, despite a Big Blue push, and
despite being better in essentially all respects than Windows. Sure,
some business customers bought it.
Quite a lot bought it - it was just not front and center on the stage.
I think every AS/400 installation was also an OS/2 installation. Same
with the mainframe crowd. Percentage of market share does not mean
something did not take off. If it were, the Mac and Linux would both
be flops.
Commercially, Linux is a flop. It has an "excuse" in that it's a
hobbyist project that metastasized. It didn't start out trying to be
the end-all O/S. Linux is also growing, and is actually becoming a
market force in the server world. The Mac is also a success in that its
sales have (I believe continually) grown. Steve Jobs may have had some
idea of taking over the world with the Mac, but that only shows one what
good drugs one can buy when one makes a lot of money. (JUST kidding.)
There are several markets in which the attributes of the Mac have made
it popular, and rightly so. I'm thinking primarily of graphic arts,
typesetting, and the like.
OS/2 never really had that. It has not steadily grown. The first
releases were buggy, it was always a bit slow and demanding of the
hardware. By the time good releases of OS/2 were available, the market
had moved on. There never was a specialty market especially well served
by OS/2, and it clearly was intended to be "the next wave" of software.
By the time the kinks had been worked out of OS/2, it's sales were
falling off, and it had the faint smell of death about it.
I liked it, but my liking it had nothing to do with my evaluation of
its chances. In the same way that the PS/2 showed IBM's inability to
force the hardware market in a new direction, OS/2 showed that IBM no
longer could set the pace in software. At the time, I thought OS/2 to
be a colossal waste of programmer time and effort. At the time, I was
grousing about IBM should have taken UNIX, for which it was licensed,
and put their programmers' time and effort into producing a wonderful
GUI for UNIX. As I see it, much of OS/2's initial lack of acceptance
was due to the fact that some of the basics of the O/S didn't work well
in the first couple releases. By the time those problems had been
fixed, it was too late to wrest market share from Windows, which was
becoming the juggernaut it is today. If OS/2 had been utterly stable,
that is, UNIX, with a GUI that was ever-improving, I think it would have
aborted Windows, rather than the reverse, as happened.
Just my opinion, but I was consulting at the time, and people who
bought computers for small business were waiting to see if OS/2 would
work out. Some of them told me that, and bought Windows "while they
were waiting for OS/2." Well, that didn't work out at all well for
OS/2. By the time that OS/2 was ready for wide business acceptance,
most everybody had bought into the Windows platform.
These are installations that we normally do not see,
but that does not
mean they do not exist. For example - how many people here have
actually been in close contact (use regularly, even if just a little
at a time) with AS/400s? Four? Five?
Me, for one. I had to write some program to pick information out of
spool files. Nasty business.
IBM has, however, made a helluva lot of the machines
(more than
PDP-11s, actually). Are they flops because most of us see
Windows or Unix machines at work? Are they flops because
OS/400 has less than a percent of market share?
Not in MY opinion, FWIW. But, if IBM had expected the 400 to take
over the world, and yearly sales had been dropping rather than rising, I
would say it WOULD be a flop. OS/2 was never more than a fringe player,
although it had promise at one point. It all gets down to what one
defines as a "flop." As I see it, OS/2 was a "big-company" flop --
like
the Ford Edsel.
Peace,
Warren E. Wolfe
wizard at
voyager.net