[KLUG Advocacy] Re: Advocacy digest, Vol 1 #11 - 1 msg

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2002-05-05 at 19:31, Adam Williams wrote:
> >This is a very special example, and it's been the subject of more than
> >a little bit of litigation, too. OS/2 started as something of a joint
> >venture between IBM and Microsoft, and M$ essentially jumped ship and
> >moved to their own development after a time, which resulted in what we
> >now know as Windows NT. IBM (which never knew how to market anything
> >smaller than a refrigerator), was completely outflanked here. 
> 
> Ok,  but the point is M$ wanted OS/2 to die.  And when they "made" it so
> newer-Win32 apps no longer ran under OS/2... kaput.

Okay, let's get something straight here.  Marketing at IBM did NOT kill
OS/2.  It was IBM's PC division that insisted it "needed" Windows at
_any_ cost.  The strategy was flawed and only ended up in IBM giving
away all their OS/2 source code to Microsoft for free.

And, BTW, NT has a heafty basis in VMS.  This is largely because it was
written by Digital.  In fact, they needed "emulation" in Windows 3.1 to
run many of the 16-bit apps at the time.

> True.  I see Mac winning back lost niches (artsy folks) and some new
> niches (techies who need UNIX without the fuss).  Getting back the
> schools is going to be tough, and neck-n-neck I think Linux is better
> suited for that.

I disagree.  Macs seem to be the easiest peer-to-peer platform to
administer.

-- Bryan

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com