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Re: that was because of monopolistic practices

"That race was not won on merit, but rather hype and leveraging their monopoly."

Really? They had a monopoly in 1995? Wow, that time I spent running OS/2 back then must've just been an illusion.

Before Win95 came out OS/2 was my favorite OS. I could program in DOS at work, and if a program crashed, I didn't have to reboot and run Scandisk to recover. It also ran all Win 3.11 apps. What was not to like about it? Well for one thing it was notorious for not installing properly unless your machine matched a limited set of hardware specifications. I can remember my manager cringing when I suggested installing it. I wanted to because of the greater crash protection it offered. But he said, "I dunno. It could really screw up your machine."

Win95 was not like this. It installed on a much wider variety of PC hardware, and did so without crashing in the middle. It offered the same level of crash protection in "DOS Window" mode as OS/2 did. And it could run Win 3.11 apps. For what we needed at the time, it was just better.

IBM had plenty of opportunity in the early 90s to win ISVs over to their platform. It just didn't work out. IBM, in fact, had the advantage at the time, because they CREATED the PC industry as it existed. I doubt even MS could've created the kind of market that eventually occured, by themselves. They needed IBM's tremendous marketing muscle, and reputation in the business to push it forward in the 1980s.

And I don't understand why some people have such love for OS/2, especially when ABMers seem to be so in love with the idea of "open standards". OS/2 was not about that at all. It was originally designed to run on IBM's proprietary PS/2 machines, which had IBM's own MicroChannel bus architecture. It didn't have any of the ports of the original PC. Peripherals HAD to be MicroChannel compatible to work with it, and IBM owned the rights to that specification! The PS/2, along with OS/2, was IBM's attempt to lock customers in with hardware. They had tried the approach of creating an open hardware architecture (where the only proprietary piece was the BIOS), assuming that others would clone it, but that IBM could stay ahead of the pack. It didn't work, and they were trying to salvage what customer base they had and prevent them from buying PC clones. It was a pure lock-in strategy. Have no illusions about that. IBM only made OS/2 PC-compatible after it was clear that their MicroChannel strategy wasn't going to work out for them.

IMO, at the time that you're talking about, people prefered going with MS than with other platforms, BECAUSE of merit. Now, I'm sure it wasn't the same kind of merit that you're talking about, but customers and ISVs had their own reasons for going that direction, and technical merit, as you define it, wasn't necessarily at the top of the list.

I can buy the argument that Netscape lost due to MS's monopolistic practices, but this came later, when it became clearer that MS had a monopoly on the desktop. In the early to mid-90s. It wasn't so clear. There were still competitive choices in that realm.

Posted by: Mark Miller   Posted on: 11/03/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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