Re: Free OS/400

Yup. IBM tried all that. I sure wish I'd been making even a tiny commission
on the money they dumped into trying to sell OS/2. But what they had to
fight against was the fact that people really don't go shopping for a new
OS. OS/2 was popular in some industries, like banking. I think it sold into
places where someone actually went into the board room with the cost
comparison between the cost of conversion, and the cost of downtime.

But most MIS shops didn't bother to compare stuff like that. Some that did
wouldn't make the change anyway. At Cardinal West, where the standard for
the desktop is and was Windows, I had OS/2 running. The desktop guy was a
Microsoft fan. Every other desktop in the office would crash. I demonstrated
for him my desktop running multiple copies of the same Windows apps that
were crashing on Windows. I showed him how, with OS/2, you could isolate two
Windows apps so that they would run in separate environments and thus be
more reliable than if they were running on Windows. He never once considered
OS/2. He spent many late nights tweaking Windows configs to try to make it
stable, but to no avail.

When the corporate desktop guys came to town, because we were putting on a
trade show, I gave the same demo and the same spiel to them. But, of course,
it would not be considered. The people hired to keep desktops running were
hired because of their Windows knowledge. They were not about to make
desktops more reliable by moving to a product where they were no longer the
experts.

There was no inroad for OS/2 to make. "Desktop experts" mean "Windows
experts" so they weren't about to jump on it.

There were a couple hundred RPG guys (not in Las Vegas, but around Cardinal)
but none of them was interested in a more reliable desktop. I remember
visiting with one group of them, and none of them wanted to use anything
besides SEU on a green screen anyway. So, when they got PCs they'd just set
up a full screen emulation session to get their PC to pretend it was a dumb
terminal. If/when that crashed, the AS/400 protected their session so they
didn't lose anything and got a little extra coffee time.

So, I understand why IBM wants to dress up the AS/400 in new clothes and try
new things to present it around. I understand why they want to tout a host
of new and improved features instead of publishing catalogs of the existing
apps.

One thing IBM knows for sure, they won't lose their existing customer base
any faster. After all, the guys developing on AS/400s now won't change
unless they have to. IBM could shut down new development completely, and
aside from a handful of complaining emails, nothing would happen. Is there
some room full of AS/400 programmers somewhere that would say, "What! No
updates to ILE?! I'm switching to C++!"?

----- Original Message -----
From: <rob@dekko.com>
To: <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 2:43 PM
Subject: Re: Free OS/400


>
> Sort of like IBM's full page ad which touted OS/2 and called NT 'Nice
Try'.
> And then listed why NT was so much weaker than OS/2?
>
> Rob Berendt
>
> ==================
> A smart person learns from their mistakes,
> but a wise person learns from OTHER peoples mistakes.
>
>

Chris Rehm
javadisciple@earthlink.net
If you believe that the best technology wins the
marketplace, you haven't been paying attention.


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