Hello, your web page looks very nice. However it would be very helpful if Louis Gerstner would spend the money and go after the consumer and educational markets hard with OS/2.
Where, indeed, is the serious word processor for the serious computer OS? Academic writers such as myself influence institutional buying decisions, yet no one seems to ask us what we need or want in a word processor. I married XyWrite years ago -- when it was judged as good as (if not better than) WordPerfect. It's development has stagnated since being bought out by The Technology Group, who made the bizarre decision to try keeping up with the WIN crowd instead of carving out a niche. We still await GOOD support for foreign language typefaces/fonts (WP's modules work, but agonizingly). Where is unicode? Where are the integrated charting features? where is the ability to organize files in such a way as to take care of the OS/2 desktop paradigm that makes the program "disappear"? I wait...
So much for NCs where I work. I just learned about the college's strategic plan on our intranet site today. It calls for _DE-NETWORKING_ the college software and individually empowering the users' local PC's while maintaining network connectivity.
IF (and here's the big joke), IF IBM had marketed Warp 4.0 as a powerful, versatile, stand-alone operating system with great connectivity, instead of as a top-down centralized "corporate solution", Maybe it could have been at the right place to get this site of several hundred units which will now go to Windows 95 (97?) in the fall.
So much for the wisdom of picking and choosing who you will deem to advertise to and who you shall desire to ignore. (And, I agree, so much for the wisdom of linking Warp in people's minds with mainframe connection and ignoring the fact that it can be a powerful stand-alone system.)
On the larger picture, IBM is now so out of the loop that stories about the popularity of Warp Server have become simply embarassing. Our department has been lobbying for its own server for some time and I have been slipping these articles to our MIS person. They have had no impact and I can't blame her. Warp is a non-product. Where is the advertising? Where is Warp Server magazine on the stands? Where are all the articles in the larger trades about Warp and Warp Server? They're not there. Who cares about ATM machines? I've never worked in a department that ran its own ATM machine.
MicroSoft has won the hearts and minds, the very consciousness of the users and purchasers, to the extent that WinTel is one word and any deviation from that strategy can mean putting your job, career, and future on the line. How thick a book could be written on IBM's stupid marketing tricks that allowed its lunch to be eaten in this way?
I'm not pulling Warp 4.0 from my machine, and I've resisted Win95, but I will [be] at the store this fall for Win97.
Chris Wenham's editorial hits the nail on the head; it's a classic case of the glass being half full or half empty. With the demise of OS/2 mag, OS/2 developer, etc., a pessi- mist could really find some things to complain about. In the Air Force fighter business we always complain about something. It's a well known fact that when fighter guys stop complaining, things must be REALLY bad. Otherwise, the more trivial the complaints, the better things must be. If you apply this logic to the current OS/2 world, things must be GREAT!
Thanks for the little moment of comfort and satisfaction. I live in GPF land of "GOTTA BE YOUR FAULT". It keeps me alive to know that so many people know (and thereby love) OS/2. It is sheer joy to have the emperor's clothes so witily described.
If we can put a man on the moon ... IBM should be able to come up with some kind of technology that allows them to have ONE setup disk with all the information to connect to the CD-ROM and continue the install. If nothing else, they could compress the heck out of everything on the three disks with just enough of a boot-up from the ONE disk to uncompress the files to the hard disk and then have it reboot and THEN find the CD-ROM and continuing on from there. That would allow only one disk in the setup process and make many of us a lot happier.
If PCs were built like MACs (which I use a lot too), the setup disk could automatically eject itself just before it reboots after the ONE disk and a meer human wouldn't have to be around at all after booting from the boot disk and answering a few questions which I think should be right at the very beginning (like easy install? y/n).
In your article you suggested "isn't it time config.sys was put out to pasture?" May I say NO NO NO don't do it IBM!! That goddamn *&^^% Win 95/NT registry is the biggest pain in the butt since Win 3.1 was released !!!
The OS/2 config.sys may be long but at least you can see where everything is. (Except for the stuff in the os2.ini and os2sys.ini can we get rid of these please !!!) The control OS/2 gives over itself is the best of the non Unix Intel OS's, I'd hate to see that changed.
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