Jack Stein wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 JS> Roy J. Tellason wrote in a message to Jack Stein:

 RJT> They may just try,  but I don't think they'll succeed.

 JS> I hope you're right, but, I have serious reservations.  The 
 JS> power of MS, IBM, INTEL and ZIFF-DAVIS cannot easily be 
 JS> under-rated.

 RJT> "The power" that those folks may hold,  such as it is,  is a
 RJT> matter of economics,  and of doing things within some fairly
 RJT> narrowly defined commercial channels -- the home and
 RJT> smaller-end business market for M$,  the medium and larger
 RJT> business market for IBM,  etc.  That's why OS/2 isn't being
 RJT> agressively marketed by IBM,  it crosses that boundary.  The
 RJT> whole philosophy behind Linux is outside that framework.

 JS> I can't agree with you here Roy. 



It's not something I'm all that worried about here,  and I haven't really
reasearched this to get solid numbers.

 JS> Both the home, and business (large and small) is totally 
 JS> domonated by MS products.  You would be hard pressed to locate 
 JS> a business that was not running MS OS's.

Oh?  I suppose if you're counting number of copies sold there can't be any
doubt of that,  but I'm also thinking of dollars spent.  There's no way I'm
going to believe that either the big iron out there or the midrange stuff runs 
any m$ software.

 JS> Who would ever guess that 25 years after the worlds greatest OS 
 JS> was presented to the world, 

 RJT> You talking about unix here?

 JS> Yes.

 JS> the world would be totally dominated by the likes of DOS/WIN,

 RJT> The world?  The home pc market,  maybe.  Businesses and
 RJT> academia do tend to run a lot of other stuff besides.

 JS> They are dominated by MS OS, and not by a little.

On what are you basing this?

 JS> the worlds worst OS's for at least 15 years running?   It 
 JS> boggles the mind, doesn't it?

 RJT> Not really.  There are a few factors that tend to account
 RJT> for some of this. 

 JS> Sure, it is a rather complicated issue on the surface, but
 JS> underneath, it gets much simpler.

 RJT> For one,  unix was originally a very proprietary product,  
 RJT> owned by Bell Labs, and licensed to a small number of vendors.  

 JS> Yes, and very expensive, and made for big iron, there was no
 JS> little iron at that time.

Big iron?  Seems to me it was written for what would later be classed as
"minis".

 RJT> I don't know just when that changed,  but it did.  A variant 
 RJT> written for smaller machines called Minix (also written as a 
 RJT> teaching tool) came about,  and growing out of that is how 
 RJT> Linux got started. 

 JS> When the computer was ready to burst on the home scene is when 
 JS> the fun, and market manipulation began.

It's no coincidence that m$ started with not one but _two_ lawyers in the
initial group,  a fact that's endeared neither them nor lawyers in general to
me...

 JS> IBM was in charge, and they chose MS to run the software end of 
 JS> the business. 

I guess I have a somewhat different perspective on this stuff as I don't think 
of that point in time as being when it all started.  I was into it a long time 
before then,  and the entry of IBM into the market was something I didn't take 
seriously for a while.  It _did_ have a bunch of far-reaching effects,  mostly 
the standardization of the hardware and software bases on which things could
build,  and that more than anything else is why it started to snowball from
there.

 JS> That has not changed, and the result of course is the worlds 
 JS> worst OS dominating the home and business market.

To a point...

 RJT> I think it's just starting to gain momentum.  And since I've 
 RJT> started paying a bunch of attention to it the traffic in that 
 RJT> echo has grown from moderately busy to about twice the volume 
 RJT> of this one!  

 JS> LINUX gets 3 times the traffic here.  This is good but, OS/2 
 JS> conferences have always recieved a LOT of traffic in FIDO, and 
 JS> that didn't help OS/2 survive in the real world.  Almost no one 
 JS> in computing read any of this stuff.

Sure,  but that's only _one_ indication that I look at.

 RJT> While,  sad to see,  the tone of OS/2 echos in general is 
 RJT> starting to remind me of that of CP/M users after ms-dos had 
 RJT> been around a year or two.  Not that I'm ready to dump it,  
 RJT> but...

 JS> The problem with OS/2 is mainly that no one uses it, and IBM 
 JS> likes it that way. Hard to promote a product when the company 
 JS> that sells it doesn't want anyone to use it.

I do *not* understand where they're coming from with this attitude,  except
that they've been infamous for a long time for a careful orchestration of what 
they do so that nothing is going to have an adverse impact on some other
corporate division.  The likelihood probably is that that they simply choose
to expend the minimum possible resources on maintaining the product,  and
don't market it more aggressively because they're making more money moving the 
other stuff that's out there,  including their distribution of m$ product.

It's sad.  But there's no way that a bunch of users is going to change the
course of a behemoth like IBM,  so I don't figure on getting all upset about
it.  If what I _have_ is a usable product,  if it'll serve me well for what I
want to do here,  then fine,  I'll use it.  If not,  then I'll simply find
something else that will.

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