Katt Got Your Tongue?

Pondering patiently on the prickly puss who meowed out a snide comment or two along with his milk and Friskies last month, I hovered my mouse over the URL object for PC Week and wondered if I ought to delete the reference to that mouthy mouser's stomping ground for good. "Cyber Munchkin am I?" I said to myself, right-dragging the filthy file halfway to the shredder already, "crawl out of the hooches did I?"

Now you won't catch me anywhere near First Class with my $5,000 laptop humming away at a screensaver while I gaze out of the oval window and watch SeaTac airport loom up from under the clouds, I can't afford any of that jetsetting nonsense, but crawl out of the hooches?

Sorry, oh tabloid tabby, I'm not in the Fortune 500 with a million bucks to spend on a Mega UberNetwork and a copy of NT Server, but I am still one of your readers and I don't spawn off conspiracy theories involving the Trilateral Commission, Henry Kissinger, the Queen, Pope John Paul, Jimmy Hoffa or otherwise. What's more, fluffball, me and sweet Aunt Tilly still give a hoot about this here "OS/WHO."

But hey, this isn't recent. The paw-licking pundit has taken pot shots at OS/2 with his pipsqueak peashooter almost since time began. Whenever the howls of outrage die down enough he'll prance along the mantelpiece, knocking off a flowerpot or china dish or two, and chortle a chuckling meow as the silly owners fuss about and try to sweep it up before his casual tail flicks off another one. "Bad kitty! No biscuit!"

I rummaged through the litter box of this feisty feline (with a search engine and a long stick) finding that Mr. Puss loves a good giggle whenever Gerstner doesn't go out of his way to mention OS/2 (or even mention it at all) with every breath that passes his lips. (Egads! The IBM cafeteria coffee machine isn't running OS/2! What kind of "commitment" is this?? IT'S DEAD! IT'S DEAD!) So riddle me this, Catman, how many subscription cancellations do you get every time you spill your Fresh Step in the laps of your faithful readers? None? Zippo? Zilch? Why, then you're only preaching to the choir, Mr. Mistoffolees, the rest either cancelled months ago or put down the magazine after glossing over the Adult CD-ROM classifieds in the back.

But hold on for a second, stop the hissing match folks. If Spencer Katt, Bill Howard and other deranged moggies from Ziff-Davis have been trumpeting death for OS/2 for the past couple of years, yet it's still here (and in its fourth generation no less) then just what kind of harm can they be doing? Didn't someone once say "There's no such thing as bad publicity"?

We should thank them for the free advertising after all. If one keeps parading the name of a "dead" OS every year without fail then some people -- using the sense God gave a goose -- will actually go out there and try it to see if the same survival power can work for them.

I don't think Spencer Katt wants OS/2 to go away anytime soon. That would leave him with nothing left to make fun of.

And that accounts for about 95% of his column.

--

[Our Sponsor: MR/2 ICE Internet Email Client - Delivering the Email features of the future, today.]