Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education

November 1998
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The annual OS/2 conference 25/9 in Sweden

By: Bjorn Soderstrom,

To the annual conference, the OS/2 User Group had invited an american guest from Innoval System Solutions, Mr. Dan Porter, who is a well-known name in OS/2 circuits. The Innoval company is writing software intended for the customized and
corporate market, mostly OS/2 but they have also a small but very interesting supply of OS/2 products on the regular consumer market. The E-mail software Post Road Mailer is one example. In one area of computing the Innoval company have had the time to get themselves an important and market leading position and that is in Java developing.

According to Dan Porter Java is very important today, especially in the corporate market where it's already is established, but also for coming products for ordinary consumers. The difficulties with Java so far has been quite big and much of the working time they have spent has been to sort what tools to use. The talk Write once, Run everywhere is far from true yet Dan said. One of the major problems have been that the components that are used is rather badly documented. If several companies cooperates about the components but is not making them well documented enough, there is going to be some misunderstandings about the use and implementations, and that is going to produce incompatible products in the end. With that in mind You must realize that Java programs for the consumer market still has a long way to go before it's reality. Dan pointed out that the other languages that is used to code software has also been on the market for several years before You can say that they a mature so this problem is not special for Java in any case. The biggest problem is that some parts of the computer industry doesn't want Java to be the language for the future to produce platform independent software but that is a completely different question.

For us who are using OS/2, Java is already implemented into the operating system and works quite well but according to Dan that has not only been an advantage. In the developing phase Innoval has noticed that not everything in Java works from ground up in OS/2 so some additional work has to be done though Java is part of the operation system. The Java software that Innoval has been on the market for a while now is the J Street Mailer. For the time being Innoval uses mostly the Borland J Builder on Win NT for the developing after testing most tools in the business. The platform where Java is performing best now is on IBM's AIX where it's performing excellent according to Dan.

On the other hand on other UNIX-systems including Linux it has given a lot lower results. Innoval's plans for the future is to try to establish better and more extensive standards for Java, then the results will going to be much better than now. Graphics and printouts are far from good at this point. Dan also mentioned the possibility to turn Java programs into native binary-code software and there are product to come that now is under tests in laboratories and they could very well be important on the market tomorrow.

Innoval is also well known for performing cross platform development, something that more companies should perform. The WebWilly Watch is available in versions both for Win32 and OS/2 with almost the same behavior and functionality. It's a program for handing of bookmarks and logs from Your Web Browser in a way that no browser on the market can do as well as WebWilly Watch. The program is very cheap and does surfing on the Net a lot easier. Another company that is doing cross platform is Stardock with it's Object Desktop. Now when OD is going to come with version 2, it's also going to come out for Win32. It will probably turn into a big success for Stardock as the desktop of Windows is almost rudimentary compared to OS/2 even without Object Desktop. A much bigger problem in the industry now is the economy according to Dan, a lot of users is not willing to pay for software and as a result of the fact that the operation systems and Web-readers contains so much nowadays, it's hard to motivate a user to buy an external E-mail software if hi or she is satisfied with the builtin function in Netscape or any other reader. Then they don't have the motivation to buy something extra. That fact has almost destroyed the OS/2 market and it will also affect the Windows market in the long run. The competition is going to be very low and that is leading to highpriced and not so good products. Dan also suggested that the J Street Mailer could be translated to foreign languages, one of them Swedish, and that works could possibly be done within the Swedish OS/2 User Group.

The Swedish IBM gave the meeting a very interesting and important presentation of the Y 2000 problem from Leif Engdahl. If You have a system that you are using and want to continue to use after the millenium change it's a must that it's going to work also after that date. This is not a particular problem related to OS/2 or IBM or even to the Information Technology Industry, it can be a problem with a lot of products that contains electronic equipment of any kind. According to Leif Engdahl there are still surprisingly many companies that has not yet realized the potential of this problem. An OS/2 system is not Y 2000 ready directly out of the box but with all the available FixPaks for the operating system and all the sub systems like TCP/IP, MPTS and PEER, it's ready to use for the future.

IBM has produced a remarkable site that informs the users about this problem, http://www.software.ibm.com/year2000/, and even other customers than IBM's own has a lot the receive when IBM is very open even to competing products in their usual way. That is probably the result of fact that they deliver complete systems and not only separate products. The companies that is going to throw out old systems will probably be surprised when they are going to notice that there is not people and competence to be found on the market when everybody is asking for the same services. It's hardly economical or wise the do a change of system only for this reason, it's should be motivated of other reasons in that case. It's also a misunderstanding said Leif Engdahl that only the date and time 1/1 2000 that should be the problem, instead there are systems that could stop working already when 1999 starts and even after the millenium date as well.

Finally Kim Isaksen and Kristoffer Miklas from the Swedish and Danish IBM showed a little of the coming strategy and products that are coming from IBM. The WorkSpace On Demand that has not been any success in Sweden yet but is the banking community abroad is coming in a new version late in october. The biggest news is that it's going to support Win32 (not immediately) and NC-computers. There are also a much improved setup of machine classes and other installation subjects. Now when IBM is launching Java and Network Computing very hard, Kristoffer Miklas told the meeting what he coming Java-based operating system is going to be used for. Something that also is on it's way is a completely new version of Warp Server witch should reach the market in the first quarter next year. It will contain a lot of new an interesting technique that is borrowed from IBM's AIX (UNIX). Everybody who uses servers based on UNIX knows that they are much better than PC-based systems in terms of technique and reliability and if You could have a new server with those features in combination with the unbeatable object technique from OS/2's desktop it should be a very strong card on the market.

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