Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!excelan!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 640K limit
Message-ID: <2026@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 17 Jan 90 19:04:11 GMT
References: <4668.25aed7f2@uwovax.uwo.ca> <1468@blackbird.afit.af.mil> <28808@amdcad.AMD.COM> <2021@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <28824@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 44

In article <28824@amdcad.AMD.COM> phil@pepsi.AMD.COM (Phil Ngai) writes:
| In article <2021@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
| |    [  stuff  ]
| |  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
| 
| Because it's a good way to get 16 megabytes and multi-tasking and when
| all those 286 users figure that out, they'll jump for it. 

  I don't buy this at all. Users want to get things done, and they are
not about to buy a program because it needs more MB or does
multi-tasking. Unless the application does something the that can't be
done on a smaller (cheaper) machine, neither the personal user nor the
company will spend the money to get a bigger, slower, o/s and add memory
to run it.
|                                                           Also, once
| more applications are available (Pagemaker IS available) and dealers
| start figuring out how to sell plug-n-play systems that look like Macs,
| they'll make a lot of money.

  The dealers around here are managing to sell applications which look
like Macs, and they seem to do it with apps which run on existing 640k
machines. There are some windows apps, and a few EMS, but I have yet to
see an app which really *needed* os/2, and which was so much better than
what was currently running that people *had to have it*. I have yet to
see a dealer who made as much as 10% of his/her sales in os/2 as opposed
to DOS.

  Until we get a "killer app" (I think Jim Seymore used that term first)
people won't rush into os/2. And with unix interfaces like Motif, and X,
and millions of existing unix boxes to run applications, there are good
reasons for software vendors to chase that market first. I suspect that
there are 100 times as many Sun users as os/2 (just to name one vendor),
and these users are used to paying three to ten times as much for
software as the PC users.
| 
| Have you figured out yet why Apple sued Microsoft?
| Have you ever seen the screen of Microsoft Windows 3.0?

  I'm sorry, I miss how this ties to the discussion of the future of
os/2. Is there a connection?
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me