Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education

April 1998


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



View From the End (User)

I am VOICE, Hear me Roar

By: dON k. eITNER (freiheit@tstonramp.com) http://www.tstonramp.com/~freiheit/

Not so long ago, in a galaxy that's not too far away, a group of daring people got together to make the world realize that OS/2 was still a thriving operating system for home and small office users. Filled with good intent they were, but as with all new-fangled ideas it took them a while to get everything together. They offered people many things during their setup time; an electronic newsletter every month, online discussions with developers in the OS/2 community, comraderie; but something was missing--a large membership.

These bold revolutionaries huddled together and spoke of membership issues. The question was posed many times; "Why would anyone join VOICE? What would they get that the rest of the world doesn't?" And so began recently a campaign to finalize many points of the VOICE position. Why indeed would anyone want to join?

The first answer is simple--if you want your voice to be heard by OS/2's developers (and IBM?) then you'll now need to become a VOICE member in order to attend the popular SpeakUp sessions on IRC. Recent SpeakUp sessions of note have included the Win32-OS/2 team (nearly 70 people showed up for that one), Tim Sipples (IBM Network Computing Software), and a SpeakUp with Sam Detweiler, device driver author extraordinaire for IBM. SpeakUp sessions for the near future may include such people as the developers of AccuCount/2 accounting software, the Opera/2 web browser porting team, and returns of both Tim Sipples and the Win32-OS/2 team, who could return at any time after an update of their amazing tool.

Regular VOICE chat sessions will still be open to the public; only the SpeakUp sessions will be by membership only. The logs of the SpeakUp sessions will be available on the website as always, but if you want to be there when it happens and be able to give your feedback to help shape the future of OS/2, you will now need to be a VOICE member. The monthly newsletter will likewise remain free to the public, as VOICE's primary means of putting the word out on new and upcoming products, events, and ideas.

The second answer is also simple. With increased membership, VOICE can continue to operate and to grow, thus making our unified voice for the OS/2 market stronger and more precise than a bunch of scattered user groups. VOICE is a more refined, internet based, user group that gets results (note our popular SpeakUp sessions and monthly newsletter--one of the last OS/2 e-zines on the world wide web). The more members we have, the stronger we can lobby to get new developers to do SpeakUp sessions, even developers who do not currently make products for OS/2 (Corel, ID, Epson, Hewlett Packard) which would mean you would get a chance to tell them right up front how much you and others would appreciate using their OS/2 based software and OS/2 supported hardware (did someone say color inkjets and scanners?). Without such support, they've no incentive to do anything off of the Windows and occasionally Macintosh platform.

Do you wish you could buy WordPerfect 8 or Corel Draw 8 for OS/2 or an official Quake II for OS/2? You could continue sending your solitary e-mail and having these companies laugh at you as a single, lonely OS/2 user, or you could join VOICE and bombard them with hundreds of names of people who would pay to get a good native OS/2 version of their software (not a cheap port like WordPerfect 5.2), giving them much more reason to take you seriously You can further talk to a person in their company who can actually do something (which is always better than sending an e-mail to webmaster@whatever.com because you can't find the address of anyone important) during our SpeakUp sessions and tell them exactly what you want, how you want it, and what price you'd be willing to pay to get it. We were all exceptionally lucky that Opera Software took the initiative to do Project Magic and ask us to show our support for their web browser, but history has shown that we can't rely on most Windows developers to do this--we must present them with the reason to develop for us.

The third answer to the question is not so simple. There are several options being weighed at this time by the VOICE executive board that would set VOICE members apart from the general public. Included, unofficially, among these are the option of making deals with OS/2 software developers and vendors to provide discounts or special bundle deals to VOICE members (proof of membership required at time of purchase), offering VOICE members tangible (promotional) items such as keychains, bumper stickers, or t-shirts with the VOICE and/or OS/2 name on them that would work to both show your support for OS/2 and to advertise OS/2 to others, and the possibility of working with any company that might possibly convince IBM to license a consumer version of OS/2 to them for continued development and distribution. Again, these are all merely possibilities at this time, nothing's been officially decided, but any of them would have a greater chance of becoming reality with the more members VOICE has to "throw their weight around".

Being the self-appointed voice to the world on behalf of OS/2's home and small office (SOHO) users is not an easy task. There's an awful lot of ground to make up for IBM's marketing failures and refusal to target any but the largest companies. Times like these are the ones most crucial to a product's success and which most rigorously test a user's loyalty to their operating system, and VOICE have stepped up to take on the tasks. But VOICE, being an organization by and for OS/2 users, needs the support and input of those users in order to do its job.

I'm writing this from my own personal view which may or may not be sanctioned by the whole of VOICE: If you sit idly by while OS/2's image dwindles in the mainstream market, then you have no right to put all of the blame on anyone (IBM, Microsoft, VOICE, or Ziff-Davis) because you are also to blame for not making it worth anyone's time and effort to adequately support OS/2. The only chance OS/2 has in these markets is you (all of you) and so it would behoove you to become an active member and thereby personally ensure the continued existence and success of your chosen operating system. You and I chose OS/2 for a reason--that reason will continue to exist for many years, but unless you and I speak out now, it may not be provided to end users and small business users next year at this time. You've got nothing to lose by joining VOICE and everything to gain.

In the end, the good feeling you get from knowing you did the right thing in promoting an open market where competition, not marketing blitz, sets the rules should be your greatest reward. The extras that might go along with a VOICE membership are just that--extras. If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem, and OS/2's home/SOHO market has enough problems from IBM without idle users making it worse.


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