Have they given up?

[John Bridges]

On Fri, 14 Apr 2000 07:39:49 -0700 (PDT), Kris Sorem Sr wrote:

>>I also left OS/2 a few years ago (I think I formatted over the last OS/2
>>partition in late 1997?), slowly moved over to WinNT (now Win2000).
>>
>Another Microsoft marketing success story. Do you follow this logic with
>other product purchases? Change to an inferior product because it is more
>popular.

Did I say WinNT or Win2000 are inferior to OS/2?  I'm sure I didn't, because
I didn't believe so at the time, or now.

First I'll say, if WinNT had the exact same market share as OS/2, with the
exact same level of Driver support, and Application support, I would still
have switched. I would have had less reasons to switch, but I would have
switched If only based on the level of support provided by Microsoft vs IBM
(just as most of IBM did).

I found WinNT much more stable than OS/2, in particular the relatively simple
windows desktop was nearly rock solid, and could easily be backed up, while
my OS/2 desktop was extremely flakey (and slow) needing constant care and 3rd
party utilities to backup and massage.  Like Steve, I wasn't so impressed
with WPS. Nice to have shadows be truely connected to files instead of the
.LNK kludge in Windows. But the .LNK files mostly work and are predictabe,
while shadows did strange things when files were moved around or copied by
non WPS programs.

The applications software for OS/2 was primitive, which only became worse
over time. Programs like Photoshop or Forte Agent or CD Creator don't exist
for OS/2.   When I left, OS/2 was running an old outdated version of
Netscape. IE was worse than Netscape before IE 4.0, but it caught up, and
then surpased Netscape. IE 5.x is faster, and WAY more stable than Netscape
4.x. 

Was WinNT a bitch to install in some cases, YES!  More so than OS/2? 
Perhaps.  Win2000 was a breeze to install, I'm quite pleased with it.  Is the
multi-tasking of DOS applications much better under OS/2 compared to WinNT,
absolutely!  But then I don't run any serious DOS applications anymore...

For quite a while I did the dual-boot, but when PMMail for windows shipped, I
was finally able to stop booting into OS/2, I didn't NEED OS/2 for anything
anymore.  I stopped using Describe, there was decent fax software for
Windows, ZOC had a Windows version (which sadly, was slow compared to other
WIndows telnet programs). The command shell I use 4OS2 was available for NT
was 4NT, and so on.

If you are happy with OS/2, fine. I'm sure you can find hardware to run it
for many years. But I decided it was time to move on.  OS/2 had lost, IBM
wasn't moving forward.  There are still people happy with their Amiga today,
and still look for the rebirth of Amiga. At this point, I think most people
put OS/2 in the same class.

>>Are you suggesting that BSW concentrate on the OS/2 version to gather new
>>OS/2 users, and upgrade dollars from existing OS/2 PMMail users?
>>
>I'm suggesting that BSW continue support for OS2 (PMMail's initial
>success). If there was *real* competition on product to product basis
>without market leverage and coercion, I think the result would be the same
>for the desktop client as it has been for the server/enterprise version.

What does "continue support for OS2" mean?

Produce new versions?

Or just fix bugs?