OS/2 is dead! -- (Yeah, right.)

I tend to do a lot of hard drive pruning, backing up, folder rearranging and other housekeeping near the middle of each month. It's not that I don't like what I do or even that I'm not a hard worker. I really enjoy OS/2 e-Zine! and almost all the work that goes into each issue. It's just that I'm a bit of a procrastinator. If there is any little detail that I can tweak on my system, I'll do it before I get down to work.

So as I sit here in the first few weeks of March, I have a very smoothly running OS/2 Warp 4 computer. Very smoothly running.

In fact, my computer is a productivity dream come true. Performance is snappy, it's stable as a rock and I've got a native utility or application for almost every task I can imagine. In short, I'm deliriously happy with OS/2.

But despite my happiness with OS/2, when I cruise the 'net I invariably come across someone that insists on telling me that I should, "dump OS/2. It's dead, it has no future, boo hoo hoo, blah blah blah." And it's not always just longtime Windows users who are doing this either.

Please understand, I don't begrudge anyone their opinion and I know that evangelism comes easy to computer types, especially OS/2 users. But what I can not figure out is why some people go to the trouble (and some people go to a lot of trouble) that they do to try to convince me not to use a platform. It's not quite the same thing as trying to convince me to use a platform, if you see what I mean.

For example, like many of you, I'm not particularly in love with Microsoft. I don't hate their products, and I'm sure I could use them and be relatively happy (in fact, before I discovered OS/2 I did). Still, I am not thrilled with Windows of any variety and I think OS/2 is a better OS. So I might go out of my way to explain to someone else why this is. I might go so far as to suggest that he or she really should try OS/2. But why would I ever bother to tell someone that he should not use a Microsoft product? Quite simply, I wouldn't.

And yet, I can't get away from these whackos that insist on telling me why I should not continue to use OS/2.

The people who just troll around newsgroups looking for a fight I can almost understand (although I don't identify with them -- I've never visited comp.os.microsoft.advocacy and I couldn't care less what operating system people there use or talk about). But the blubbering sissies who go out of their way to announce to the world in print magazines or on their WWW sites why they believe everyone should immediately stop using OS/2 really confuse and irritate me.

Other contributors have echoed these sentiments in past issues but it seems that this type of person just never goes away. Despite the OS/2 community's repeated insistence that most of us are very happy with OS/2 and are getting quite a bit of work done every day, these people insist on telling us that, "OS/2 is dead," and that we should cease using it immediately. I mean, they did, didn't they?

Well I've got news for them: I use OS/2 for the same reason you use OS/2; because I like what it does for me. Not what it will do for me. Not what it could do for me. Not what NT doesn't do for me. Just what OS/2 does for me. Right here, right now, today.

I'm one of those people who believes that IBM has quite a bit more in store for our favourite OS -- but let's assume, for argument's sake, that OS/2 development does cease (IBM has explicitly stated, by the way, that development will continue). Would I stop using OS/2 now? Absolutely not. It is, quite simply, the best tool available to me today to get the work done that I want to get done. I wouldn't even consider using an inferior tool just because it "may some day be better".

So considering the facts that a) OS/2 is already the best tool for me and b) IBM is going to continue to enhance it, why do these people continue to anti-evangelize to us? I just don't know. If they have decided that OS/2 is not the best tool for them, I completely understand if they stop using it. But I don't sympathize with them when they insist on posting or printing excessive obituaries for a platform that is quite obviously doing very well for most of us.

Like I said, my machine is humming along smoothly and providing me with productivity galore. So let the whackos post their notices on their web sites, whining about why they think we should all stop using OS/2. As for me, well, my computer is running very smoothly and I just can't find any way to improve it any more. I guess I'll have to get to work now.

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