Re: "stable" platforms -- MIDRANGE-L



Chris Rehm wrote:

> I tried to stop myself, but I have to respond. First, yes, the people on
> the hill would and do get the point.
>

Chris,

Well I hope they have better luck at actually doing something about opening up 
consumer choice
than the judge who was merely removed.  And I lack confidence that anything of 
substance will
result.  A fine only results in Uncle Sam skimming some profits.

But at this point in time, what other OS with the variety of apps would the 
consumer actually
choose?  Would a company like IBM make a push for OS/2 V4 bundled w/ Lotus 
Smart Suite (voice
controlled) to become a "consumer" product?  Would they use this opportunity 
and push their
1000Mhz CPU and 10Gb/sq in. disk technology to market sooner giving a double 
whammy to the
"Wintel"?  Would the Mac take off like a rocket?

It is my understanding that the big threat in the browser war is that the 
browser is just the
tip of the Java iceberg.  With a mature Java bundled with a SQL compliant DBMS 
and 100% Java
applications, the OS becomes more of a bundling of utilites similar to the 
arrangement with
Linux.  The up side is that it would beg to question where M$ would play a 
role, the down side
is that at every location you went to the "Device Manager" may behave totally 
different.

How would this effect us trying to tie desktop machines to the AS/400?  Would 
the beauty of a
multi layer OS approach that the AS/400 uses to separate application from low 
level services
from hardware services become the "standard" and who would decide on such a 
standard?  How
long will it take them to make up their mind?  Would anarchy set in? For 
example, Netscape got
tired of waiting for the standards organizations to approve a function so they 
just put it out
there and essentially created the "standard".  Good free market ability.  But 
now a published
web page must be frame/text selectable.  How many of these "selections" do you 
want to have to
embed into your applications?

In my worst case scenerio vision, the technologies would fragment for a period 
of time which
would not help the AS/400 or ourselves progessionally in the short term.  
TCP/IP and Telnet
are lacking services so we would have to take a step backwards in order to take 
two steps
forward. Timing is everything and with the world facing Y2K issues I'm not sure 
I want ot see
the desktop going through a major shift right now.  The last time M$ was in 
court would have
been a better time.  A lot of dust would have settled by now.

I'm afraid that we'll be living with Win9x for some time to come.  And changes 
will start to
occur just about the time CA/400 makes peace with Windows :-)

Now if we could port OS/400 to a desktop.....

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