The 1996 Egg-In-The-Face Awards

In the beginning, PC Magazine columnist Bill Howard predicted "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN".... (cough) oops, sorry, I mean he said "IBM's OS/2 packs it in." To him we send one large egg along with a framed 1996 calendar that has the date September 25th circled in bright red marker (darts not included, sorry Mr. Howard). I notice he didn't make the same mistake for '97. (Then again, he predicts that businesses will dump Win 3.1 and shell out for Windows NT on Pentium Pro desktops instead of Windows 95. <splutter, chortle, guffaw>.) Is PC Magazine going to keep up their yellow (journalism) streak of "OS/2 is dead" messages? $10 says Jim Seymour will belly up to this bar soon ("Norm!")

A sad farewell to Tibbets and Bernstein, we'll miss you too! (Well... no... not really.) Just like Ann Landers felt it was her duty to tell her readers that she'd divorced her husband, we feel obligated to tell you this: An operating system does not seek a lawyer if you decide to dual-boot. One volley of Hen Grenades as pun-ishment for using such a ridiculous analogy.

OS/2 Professional Magazine. An omen that another major print OS/2 publication was about to follow their lead and cease business. Well, I never read it myself but after taking a short trip to their web site I can see that I didn't miss that much after all. It's sad that all the major US print OS/2 magazines have closed, but with electronic magazines like e-Zine!, Warp Online, OS/2 Computing! and others, maybe it's not as bad as some think. I don't think OS/2 Professional's failure was due so much to IBM's supposed lack of commitment as it was to the editorial staff's sour apples opinion pieces. A double-helping of yolk for these guys, and oh... if anyone out there would like to send me your old issues of OS/2 Professional I have a place set aside at home just for them. To paraphrase the always witty Samuel Johnson, sir, your magazine is before me now... soon it will be behind me.

And who could leave out Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III, who in a BusinessWeek article pooh-poohed the idea of IBM doing well with Lotus or Java. I guess time will tell, Mr. Gates. Do you think Microsoft will be able to deliver more overhyped, poorly engineered products that tack on a load of pretty pictures, animations and sounds that add zero productivity benefit but make users think the product must be better than it actually is? ''They have an absolutely perfect track record on software,'' Wenham says sarcastically. Lets make this egg a hard boiled one.

I think I should just as well offer the whole bloody farm to PC Week who, in their 1996's technical disappointments article, temporarily forget that it was a story about technical failures and instead use it as a forum to whip Warp's performance from a marketing perspective. Notice also that they dismiss the tight VoiceType dictation and navigation in a manner so cavalier you'd think it was trivial. Well, the first PC operating system with fully integrated voice navigation was also the first commercial operating system in the world that had Java fully integrated too. Any mention of that in their technical article? Nooo. So here's a joke: How many PC Week journalists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only one, if he puts the right spin on it.

Which brings me to the last recipient of the Egg-on-your-face awards. This one goes to the rather brash OS/2 journalist who last month came off sounding like the authority on MOD players, but actually goofed in several places including leaving one major OS/2 MOD player out of the review entirely. He actually had Muse/2 ready to review but left it out because it didn't work when he tested it. It turns out that the turkey only tested one file during the rush to meet the deadline, and it just happened to be one of the few files that Muse/2 does crash on. To my readers who put up with such drivel, I apologize. I made up for it this month. Oh, and on a leaving note, I do not have a Gravis Ultrasound but I'm sure UltiMOD works wonders with one anyway.

Keep your ears and eyes peeled for more candidates next year, because it's my sole prediction that I'll have no trouble at all writing this column again in 1998. There's just too much material to work with.

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