Microsoft settles IBM antitrust claims

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IBM advertising missed the ball

I completely fail to see the business rational in the bashing and wanting to fail of a prominent American based business. Have we not seen enough bleeding in the industry already as a whole? Can?t we all just get along? (Sorry, couldn?t resist the temptation) The way in which MS has been seen as the bad guy makes me laugh, what about all the other closed systems? What about the supposedly OPEN systems? We live in a society that thrives on Capitalism here in the US. If a business does not make money, they close.

Ok, on the whole OS/2 thing.
(Note, my argument does not go into the merits of the systems, but, the underlying marketing efforts of the respective companies. That would be a whole other topic in itself)

IBM advertising missed the ball and waited on the sideline while IBM management pissed off the relationship with MS. MS came up with what they thought was a better system, mainly NT. IBM was trying to impose too many restrictions on MS basically trying to squash NT. IBM made a mistake and left it to the respective marketing departments to settle in the open market. IBM failed to garner the support of developers and lost fair and square. During that time you were hard pressed to find any worthwhile tools available for OS/2 that didn?t come with restrictive licensing or were totally overpriced for the current market. The tools should have been the loss leader in the marketing campaign, but, IBM stuck to their ways and charged way too much for the development tools while Microsoft on the other hand and a host of other 3rd party manufactures sold for much less if not free. IBM treated this platform as a second class citizen just like they did with the original PC and the DOS operating system itself. So, they seeded the playing field with nothing so they reaped nothing.

I was very much in favor of the OS/2 platform, I went so far as to order the platform before it was released and waited for my box of OS/2 floppies to arrive with anticipation of great performance and versatility. But, when it arrived, there were no native applications to run on it and no development was in place to create native OS/2 applications. So, the next choice was NT 3.5. This platform had multiple applications available for it from the get go. MS basically gave away development tools while NT was still in beta, allowing applications to be ready on launch. Also, the driver support on the NT platform was much more comprehensive that on the OS/2 platform. So, unless you were around at that time and involved in the actual development, you do not have the whole picture of the situation.

Posted by: dbaelegance   Posted on: 07/01/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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