September seemed to drag on endlessly for some of us.

While some lucky few in the US managed to get their hands on Warp 4 on the 25th of last month (and earlier in some cases), the majority of us sat biting our nails and wondering if that noise we just heard was the FedEx delivery person at the door.

But FedEx finally did deliver (at least for most of us). And for those of you who have not yet gotten a glimpse of the newest incarnation of Warp, it is now filtering its way into direct mail and retail stores across the world.

By all accounts, the launch event in San Francisco last month was a well attended affair. (IBM invited 700 industry journalists and the press never turns down a free lunch.) But many people have already started worrying that not enough "mainstream" press have taken notice of the launch. At this point, it's still a little early for reports to actually have made their way into the print world; time will tell if IBM's money for free lunches, plane tickets for developers and satellite links was well spent or not. I'll be hoping that the recent increase in positive interest in Warp by the mainstream press continues.

Media aside though, some people have been disappointed at recent IBM statements concerning our OS of choice, including some made at the Warp 4 event itself. And the new pricing structure for Warp speaks louder than anything IBM could possibly say. Here in Canada the upgrade version of Warp 4 sells for between $160 and $185 (street prices) and even in the States it is about $110 through mail order stores. Some may argue that US$110 isn't that much higher than Warp 3 was when it was released but remember, to get this price you already have to own a license. The full version sells for almost double that.

So it's settled. IBM is not keeping prices low to aggressively target the end user. In fact, it seems IBM is not targeting the end user at all.

Or are they?

Many feel that IBM hasn't really stopped planning to sell large numbers of OS/2 Warp licenses to the masses; they have just stopped believing that they will in the near future. There is some easily observable support for this theory.

First, there are the various changes that have been made to Warp this year. Who were these changes made for? It's well known that Windows 95 has been somewhat slow to be taken up by corporate users; they were either uninterested in its improved interface, doubted its stability or were reluctant to upgrade machines. By all accounts, the majority of Win95 licenses shipped have been preloaded on new machines.

So now IBM, who claims to want to target only these same corporate users, has released Warp 4. Not just with a souped up interface, complete with WarpCenter; not just with Netscape Navigator (free!); not just with spiffed up icons, bitmaps, etc. (All those things are there!) On top of all these features, they've done one better than Microsoft once again by including the gee-whiz feature of the decade -- VoiceType.

Businesses weren't swayed to switch to Windows 95 in droves, despite all its cosmetic enhancements and IBM thinks that these same businesses will rush out to buy Warp 4? Maybe. Or maybe business users don't want to use a whiz-bang feature like VoiceType as much as the home user does. Maybe IBM knows this.

The second reason is the retail situation. When Warp 3 was released it wasn't exactly hard to buy it in retail stores -- IBM is a big company after all and they pushed it pretty hard. But here in Canada it was almost a full month after the release before it was even in some distributor's warehouses, let alone retail stores. This time, Warp hit the streets, via more mature mail order businesses such as Indelible Blue and J3 Computer Technologies, the very day of its release.

And people in the US and Canada were able to walk into retail stores either on the 25th or a few days after and find copies on the shelves. Retail stores. In fact, thanks to Canadian distributor, House of Technology, retail outlets from up here in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia all the way to the other side of the continent now have OS/2 Warp 4 in stock as well as other OS/2 software. The retail situation is improving.

Is this how Fortune 500 companies make their purchases? At the local computer store?

Maybe IBM knows which way the wind is blowing after all. Maybe they realize that if Microsoft can spend $200 million of their own money (and hundreds of millions more of other companies') and fail to take the world by storm, then an underdog like OS/2 probably wouldn't fare much better. Maybe they realize what an important part in Warp's success Team OS/2 members and other OS/2 aficionados have played. Maybe they are counting on the grass roots support of people like us to continue to work its magic.

And don't forget, IBM still sold OS/2 v2.11 after Warp 3 was introduced. There have been reports that Big Blue will repeat this with a "reintroduction" of Warp 3 now that Warp 4 has arrived. What effect will this have on OS/2's total market share? Will it make a difference? Only time will tell.

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