Winners Never Quit

Winners Never Quit
This is not the time to give up on OS/2.

First of all, putting aside IBM's assurances that they are "fully committed" to OS/2 (always the first sign of trouble), there has never been a more exciting time for OS/2 in its long history. By most independent accounts, there are over 8 million workstations using some version of OS/2 right now. While there are many more Windows workstations out there, that is still an amazing number, and well more than the quantity necessary for profitable application development by independent vendors and a large and vibrant user community.

With the release of Warp Server and Merlin later this year, OS/2 can once again lay claim to the most advanced and fastest operating systems on the market. No doubt that Microsoft will try to buy or appropriate technology to match them point-for-point, but we all still know, and IBM can still prove, that the technologically superior OS is still OS/2.

Why then so many long faces? Why has OS/2 failed to "take over" the PC operating system market? The answer is that Windows is still viewed as the "underdog" and Microsoft as the young, limber, hip company lead by Bill Gates, Chairman of the American Dream. The real truth however, is that Microsoft has become what IBM once was.

The old IBM would effectively dictate computer purchases to their customers, forcing them to move along, version to version, just to keep up with the "standard" - really just whatever IBM thought should happen. Users had no choice - there was no alternative. IBM would shut out all competition by introducing what was called FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt - about rival products and technologies. They would announce new products, often with no delivery schedule in place, just to one-up competitive technologies. They would hide away software and hardware specifications to shut out competition. The result was a stranglehold on the computer world, and it wasn't until a major shift in the whole idea of computing would IBM stumble and be forced to rethink their ways.

It turns out that some of those same people who applauded the downfall of IBM are the first ones to jump on the Microsoft bandwagon - with what I believe to be the same predictable result in the future. Microsoft has the same stranglehold, the same concept of a "standard", and the same FUD factory. WordPerfect, Borland, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, and a hundred smaller companies are now gone, swallowed up by others, or are shells of what they once were just because they crossed Microsoft. Why did the computer industry run eagerly into the arms Microsoft? Because most IS managers would be the first to admit to you in private that they really are overwhelmed by the fast-paced change in computer technology, and appreciate knowing that at least if they made a mistake, so did everyone else.

Microsoft will be here for a long time to come. Lately they have taken to purchasing all new and promising technology to assure that at least something will carry them on. Witness the purchase of the Bettmann Archive of images, or other media and recording purchases. Microsoft is increasingly viewing itself as the provider of information, and these purchases, only possible due to incredible piles of cash, will assure that they will at least be able to make healthy money just by licensing photographs.

The truth is that the only company that can still match Microsoft product-for-product is IBM. With the purchase of Lotus and Tivoli, IBM has completed a stable of products that each represent one of the few or only competitors to Microsoft. It is for this reason alone that IBM cannot give up on OS/2: to do so would concede defeat by IBM and cause consumers to loose confidence in nearly all of IBM's stable of very profitable desktop software products. That is a risk that IBM cannot take, and so OS/2 lives on.

IBM must continue to market, expand and evolve OS/2. Microsoft will one day miss a major change in the computing world (it almost happened with the Internet), and will stumble and fall. The question is: will IBM be there when it happens?

John McDonald