Hello Cliff!
26 Jan 97 06:50, Cliff Hetherington wrote to Hans Mangold:
 CH> Quoted From: Hans Mangold
 CH>          To: Nicky Morrow
 CH>        Date: 22-Jan-97
 HM>> Nicky, please realize that IBM has made it very clear they are no
 HM>> longer interested in supporting the "consumer market" for OS/2.
 HM>> Even large companies such as Creative Labs (SoundBlaster /
 HM>> MultiMedia) have recently announced that they will *not* support
 HM>> OS/2 in the future.  And Merlin sales are *not* setting the world
 HM>> on fire.  Sad, but true.  For more details, visit the two FIDO
 HM>> echoes OSDEBATE and/or OS-DEBATE.
 HM>> So why would you want Robert Jung to waste his precious time on
 HM>> OS/2???
 CH> Perhaps because dispite a load of moans about Os/2 sales/support etc,
 CH> there are STILL a LOT of folks using OS/2? So there IS a market for an
 CH> OS/2 version of Arj.
It's a shrinking / dying market: Merlin is not selling and more and more 
users ("consumer" and corporate) are switching to Windows 95 or to NT.  
Doesn't make much business sense to me to invest in an orphaned operating 
system -- it would be the equivalent of buying shares in the Titanic after it 
hit the iceberg, just before it went South.
 CH> Other programmers have developed archivers for OS/2, perhaps because
 CH> of that market and the revenue fron it...
Even PKWare abandoned the first PKZip for OS/2 effort (v1.02) back in 1989.
 CH> Of course one can always opt out of competition or a specific market
 CH> place.. But I would have thought that anyone who uses C or C++ would
 CH> have a definate advantage in porting to other platforms/os's..
True, but what's the point?  Who would buy the end product?  FIDO SysOps?
Cheers, Hans
... Get back at your enemies!  Make them SysOps!
--- GoldED/386 2.50+ / Squish / Maximus / Binkley / WINDOWS 95 / V34+
---------------