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From: davel@booboo.SanDiego.NCR.COM (David Lord)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: OS/2 is dead?
Message-ID: <1991Jan3.173900.21070@SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 3 Jan 91 17:39:00 GMT
References: <PETE.90Dec17141012@csc-sun.mckinsey.com> <4036@dah.sub.org> <5150@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: @SanDiego.NCR.COM
Reply-To: davel@booboo.SanDiego.NCR.COM (David Lord)
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
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Various people write:

<<     I don't think OS/2's prime competitor is Unix, but rather Windows 3.0
<<     and its successor...  ;-)
<< 
< Windows 3.0 runs along with OS/2, so I don't see how they can compete.

  This remains to be seen I think. Microsoft seems to be hedging a bit lately
  on Windows compatiblity mode under OS/2. I'm not considering running 
  Windows in a DOS window here.

< I also don't see how  UnixWorld  (Current)  and  the  New  York  Times
< (Sept24th)  can show Windows competing against DOS and OS/2 for market
< share, but who am I to question journalists.. :-)

  They are, in a way, competing environments, that is a program is written
  to run under DOS, or Windows, or OS/2. Admittedly since Windows requires
  DOS you might want to think of it more as a competition between a
  parasite and its host. (-:

<     >PCs have survived rather well along with the rest of the world. In
<     >fact, the latest stats and projections (Sept 24, 1990 issue of New
<     >York Times) show operating system market share as:
< 
<     >Year	DOS	UNIX	Windows	OS/2
<     >1987	88.2	2.6	 2.3	 0.3
<     >1989	75.0	2.3	14.5	 1.7
<     >1994	43.2	7.6	28.7	13.5

  It seems hardly fair to compare number of systems between Unix and these
  others since Unix supports more users per system. Better comparisons
  might be number of users, costs of systems, or total amount of useful work
  done on the system (try to calculate that!).

< It  seems  that  OS/2 is going to be positioned against Unix, and it's
< odds of success are probably increasing as  time  goes  on.  (Personal
< opinion.)

  This as been said before but there is only a portion of the Unix market
  that OS/2 can compete for. Unix is first and foremost a multiuser operating
  system and OS/2 can't touch that market. An advantage Unix has over OS/2
  in the single user market is that it allows you to run the same system on
  your little machines as on your big machines. To me that seems like a
  fairly significant advantage.