IBM Sold Record Numbers of OS/2 Warp at End of 1995

OS/2 Sales Now Top 12 Million Worldwide

AUSTIN, Texas, January 23, 1996... IBM today announced record sales figures for OS/2 Warp, with one million licenses sold in December, escalating the total number of OS/2 Warp licenses to six million and overall OS/2 purchases to more than 12 million.

"We expected OS/2 Warp sales to rise after customers had a chance to try out Windows 95," said Wally Casey, director of marketing and brand management for IBM Personal Software Products. "December brought us proof of this when our sales reached an all-time high, capping what we believe was a very successful year for the OS/2 Warp family of products."

"After evaluating Windows 95, I'm not surprised that OS/2 sales are up," said Greg Bell, information systems supervisor at the Kentucky Department of Property Taxation. "OS/2 Warp delivers superior multitasking, is relatively easy to use and rarely crashes. I certainly wouldn't bet my business on Windows 95. It is only marginally better than Windows 3.11. In a business environment I'm staying away from Windows 95 and sticking with OS/2."

Success Breeds Success

Success of OS/2-compatible applications rose with sales of the operating system. OS/2 developers like SPG Inc., WitchDesk Inc., PowerQuest and Computer Data Strategies all experienced strong sales in the fourth quarter of 1995. And Stardock System's OS/2-based Galactic Civilizations was voted Best Game of 1995 on the Internet PC Games Charts, a site on the Internet where computer game players vote weekly on their favorite PC games.

"We just completed our largest quarter ever," said Brent Bowlby, president of Woodbury, Minn.-based Computer Data Strategies, Inc., which manufactures BackAgain/2 backup and recovery software. "OS/2 provides an open market for small companies, such as CDS, to begin their path to success. Combining this technically sophisticated operating system with a growing user base and a growing demand for native OS/2 solutions spells success for those developers developing in this market."

"We began shipping PartitionMagic in March '95, and within six months we were running a profitable business," said Eric J. Ruff, president of PowerQuest, an Orem, Utah-based company which develops a utility that allows OS/2 users to dynamically create, shrink, expand and move partitions on the fly without destroying data. "At the start of the fourth quarter, sales were up 20 percent. In November we introduced Version 2.0 and sales tripled. And in December sales for OS/2 products were again higher than anticipated."

More in Store in 1996

IBM will capitalize on a successful 1995 by connecting computer users to each other and the future with a comprehensive offering of OS/2-based products in 1996. The industry-acclaimed OS/2 Warp Server will simplify distributed computing for businesses and workgroups of all sizes when it ships this quarter. And the next generation of OS/2 Warp, code-named Merlin, will launch users further into the network-centric world of computing with market-leading plans for networking and Internet capabilities, an enhanced user interface and improved OpenDoc support.

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IBM U.S. #32

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