Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education

March 1998


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VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org




Letters to VOICE


March 13, 1998,

I accept some of the points you make about the IBM's intended market for OS/2 and the fact that they are a suppliers of business machines. But we live in a world where the PC is dominant, even in those favoured customers of IBM. However good micro channel is, unless the general user can be persuaded of its benefits there will be insufficient sales of the better product in the overall market place.

That IBM miscalculated what would happen to the PC is on a par with the statement that there was only a need for one super-computer in the world. The real trouble is that IBM is too inflexible and too slow at coping with the fast changing market place.

So far as OS/2 is concerned many people working for IBM's target companies will want the same system at home as at work, and many of the home users are in a position to influence what is bought at work. What is a small company today by IBM's standards could be the giant of tomorrow. (look what happened to microsoft!)

I think it would be a tragedy if you do ignore SOHO users. Apart from anything else there has to be an alternative to windows. The sort of monopoly microsoft is close to achieving will not be good for IBM even in its target area and will be a disaster for the rest of us.

I don't know enough much about the American Constitution but I am pretty sure that discrimination against people because of race, colour, religion etc is not approved of. Discrimination against a class of user, just because they are too small in number to suit a particular Company's business needs seems to me to be contrary to the spirit of your Constitution if not actually illegal. --
A happy home user of Warp4
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@jayell@mcmail.com (John Lewis)
9 Iwerne Close, Bournemouth, Dorset, DH9 3PW, U.K.
(01202) 779450
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Reply to the above from David Both, President of VOICE:

Thank you for your comments. We do appreciate the time you took to express your thoughts.

Discrimination against a class of user is not illegal. If it were, all of the major software packages would have OS/2 versions!

I agree with your comments about IBM. They are slow and, in my opinion, ignorant of the PC market which they single-handedly created. Unfortunately creating a market and being able to exploit it are totally different aspects of a free market economy. The Wright brothers invented the airplane - or rather some of the key technology required to build a workable airplane - but not a single aircraft company in the world makes "Wright" airplanes. Good inventors, lousy businessmen.

As for the home PC - I suspect that we will not only see a different way of taking work home as ADSL becomes more common, and rather than having a PC at home running the same apps and OS, we will see NET PCs or some equivalent at home for corporate users to enable telecommuting or work from home in the evenings.

I think the OS and apps we use at home will diverge significantly from those we use at work and that the home platform will by comparison be trivial or totally irrelevant. Home PCs will be for games, web surfing, and home finance. The driving force behind the home and office technologies are driving them apart. One is heavily oriented to connectivity technologies and the other towards multimedia technologies.

And the spirit of our constitution welcomes all users, home or business.

David Both


March 1, 1998,

Thank you for extending hope for those of us who are tired of fighting both IBM and the MS megalith. I am a rarity: I bought warp 3 at the initial release and still use it. I'm presently up to FP32.

If IBM could only see that 100,000 soho users are a larger group than ANY of the fortune 2000 companies, then perhaps we could make some headway.

However, I removed Warp from my system last night. I'm tired of drivers and install programs that don't work. I have no local users group, and know of no other users locally. Unless Stardock can persuade IBM to license OS/2, I probably will stop using it permanently.

I am love the power and stability as well as the relatively modest hw requirements of Warp. I just can't go on alone.

Tim Herrington

Response to above from the editor:

I don't think you are a rarity. A lot of people are still running Warp 3.0 and are beginning to run into some of the problems you are encountering with outdated drivers and lack of PnP support. We OS/2 users have always had to work at keeping our systems running, since most hardware support is in the hands of IBM instead of the hardware vendors. I have cursed OS/2 my self on occasion, but I have never gone to windows. I see the problems others have with their wintendo systems and I come back to my senses and work on through my problems with the resources we do have. The OS/2 community has become very self supportive with lots of help available on usenet and in the mail lists and on the web. I hope you will do the same, but if you can't then good luck with what ever replacement for OS/2 you find. And remember this is not a religion or a matter of national pride. If things don't work out, you can always come back to OS/2.


Feb. 27, 1998,

Dear editor,
I have some questions?
>From your story I understand that large businesses began to move away from OS/2 because they thought that IBM was abandoning them. First of all I don't understand that IBM couldn't serve both markets. You just make 2 divisions. Second, to where were large business moving away from OS/2? To Unix? Not that bad? To Windows? How is that possible? And they probably will come back.

Quote:
"If we are business users, then we must begin to act like it. Our membership must include Information Technology people in large companies. We must appeal to network administrators and IT executives. We must become a VOICE for those who SHOULD make the technology decisions in the enterprise. Our target market, as VOICE, should be the same people for whom IBM is targeting OS/2. If we do not recognize that, we are doomed to fail. I am not saying we should abandon the SOHO market, just that we, as IBM, must target the business market."

To my opinion it is almost impossible to sell the best product of the market. Nobody knows the product, because they don't use it at home. The neighbour doesn't use it either. IBM doesn't use it. They try to sell Windows NT. The product is dead, isn't it? It seemed to be something like Video 2000? I know better but I hope you understand that I don't want to seem ridiculous for my customers? I sincerely hope that IBM will sell OS/2 to a real "selling company" Then probably I can advice it for customers.

nt

Response to the above from the editor:

I wish I knew the answers to your questions. My personal feelings are that I don't care if OS/2 is not the most popular personal computing operating system. Unfortunately few developers are willing to continue to support a shrinking market. Eventually we'll all have to move on to something else. That is inevitable no matter what OS you are running as technology continues to evolve. I can guarantee that won't be windows9x, since that will be really dead before OS/2 breathes it's last breath.

There is a thriving shareware market for OS/2 and Java apps are beginning to appear in growing numbers. The win32-OS/2 project is now in open beta and will hopefully open up more software availability for OS/2 users These options will allow most of us to keep running OS/2 for quite a while if we choose to do so. Hopefully IBM will come to it's senses and decide they can make more money by actually producing products instead of just servicing MickeySoft's installs.


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