[pmmail-list] Feature Request

[Steve Barber]

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 13:22:22 -0400 (EDT), Carl Gehr wrote:

>Maybe so, but the exact quote from the referenced article is:
>	"...Curtis Sasaki, Sun vice president of engineering for
>	desktop solutions, told ComputerWire the company
>	'conservatively' estimates there are 20 million customers
>	stranded on IBM Corp's legacy operating system..."
>Maybe Mr. Sasaki is not in touch with Gartner either.  But, I would
>give him a little credit for looking a 'desktop systems' since he is in
>charge of 'desktop solutions' for Sun.
>

Sorry, I don't trust such "conservative" projections from
any management source ... the higher up they are, the less
I trust them.  Our dotcom CEO repeatedly projected pie in
the sky while we burned through 20 million in a marketplace
that was "nearly ready to explode with demand" ... during
the year before we went out of business :-).

>When you abandoned your 486 Aptiva,  

I didn't abandon it ... I merely don't turn that 486 on all
that much anymore.  As I said, it's a curiosity worth
keeping plugged in (if not turned on).  

As much as I believed (really wanted to believe) in OS/2
superiority, (and it was, back in the early Win95 days), I
don't remember it being any more stable than my Win98
machines are ... and certainly not as stable as my Win2000
machine is.  As it turns out, my faith was much stronger
than IBMs.  

As for the 20 million, I still believe that can't even be
close for "desktop" ... including "laptop" ... I've not
seen OS/2 even register recently on any of the OS counts
done by the programs that do statistics on who's visiting
various web sites on the Internet.    I know not all
desktops are used primarily for web browsing, but it's hard
to imaging millions of them not accessing the World Wide
Web at least occasionally.  

If you search Google for "hits by OS" you'll find many
different reports for various sites ... none that I looked
at reported more than 0.0% of the hits were from OS/2. 
Most no longer bother to report on OS/2 (or didn't have any
hits from OS/2 machines).  The most active showed 200 hits
from OS/2 out of a total for all OSs of nearly 2 million
hits.  

Still, that's somewhat impressive ... maybe there is a
business case to go after that 1 in 10,000 computers with
OS/2 on it?  If that percentage holds and if the 20 million
number is correct, then that would mean there would be
200,000,000,000 computers in the world ... I've only got
four of them ... but, if everyone else in the world had
about 40 computers each then it would  add up to that 200
billion.

SteveB
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