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From: bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 640K limit
Summary: OS/2 and market sizes ...
Message-ID: <3453@rti.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 90 06:08:28 GMT
References: <4668.25aed7f2@uwovax.uwo.ca> <1468@blackbird.afit.af.mil> <2021@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 50

In article <2021@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>, davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) writes:
>   Wait a minute. Why would any company trying to make a profit go to
> OS/2? There are so few users that they would be lucky to cover the cost
> of a new version of the compiler, much less cover their labor,
> packaging, stocking, and labor costs. And lucky to get enough ongoing
> income to cover the maintenence.
> 
>   This is not a case of lazy, just "no market." Someone told me that
> they sold more copies of their educational program for CP/M than OS/2!
> That's not a market. If this lady wasn't motivated by a desire to make
> social changes she would not have bothered.

I'm no great fan of OS/2, but I think you are greatly overstating the 
case.  OS/2 is produced and sold as a high-end operating system,
competing with things like single-user Unix systems on workstations and
high-end PC's.  It isn't likely to find its way into things like home 
computers, which is where educational software primarily winds up.

On the other hand, unless a product is either impossible (or at least
very difficult) to do under DOS, or unless porting the product to OS/2
is essentially trivial, there's no particular reason to exclude OS/2
from high-end products.  The question would be whether to implement for
OS/2 or Unix for such high-end products ... and for this sort of product,
you may be in a position where the user will decide to use the product
_first_ and then buy the OS.  Some CAD and desktop publishing situations
come to mind.

The main advantage of OS/2 over Unix is that in this sort of market, 
it's more of a standard system, in the sense that every one of them 
is more alike than all the different Unix variants are like each other.
This means that you don't have to deal with a different version of your
product for each version of the OS.  But Unix is (slowly) getting its act 
together in bringing the different versions together, and it does have a 
larger installed base (for now).

It's not quite obvious to me which will win this particular battle, or
even if there will be a clear winner.  (Though I'm sure that everyone
will agree afterwards that whatever the result is, it was obvious and
everyone should have seen it).  It's going to depend on how soon all
the players can get their collective acts together, and whether Unix
can survive the rather bad black eye it has given itself in many big
companies by its plethora of incompatible versions and the chaotic nature
of the Unix market.

But it is pretty obvious that it will be a LONG time before OS/2 -OR- Unix
ever becomes the operating system of choice for home users ... or possibly
even for the "bread-and-butter" business users as opposed to the high-
end systems mentioned above.

						Bruce C. Wright