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An ever-increasing proportion of business IT spend is being directed at the client/server/networking marketplace. Driven by new potential channels to market and the emergence of e-commerce, new applications are being developed independently of legacy systems, accessing necessary legacy data through various middleware platforms.
Over the past few years, in the course of my employment (I work in the IT services sector) I have called on many customers contemplating investing in CRM and e-commerce. Overwhelmingly, these customers have a Microsoft strategy: what they actually mean by this is that their software infrastructure will be NT server/NT client/Exchange/Office/IE. Microsoft has successfully positioned and integrated these products such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - a very attractive customer proposition.
It has been four years since I called on a customer who had an IBM strategy for these new applications and the reason is fairly clear. Although IBM has equivalent products - Warp Server/Warp client/WSOD/Notes/Smartsuite/Communicator - the company has done little, if anything, to pull these together to offer customers an alternative proposition, apparently preferring to let each take its chances in the marketplace as a point solution against, primarily, the Microsoft proposition described above. I believe this to be a major market exposure.
As a consequence of not competing with product offerings in this marketplace, IBM is reduced to selling services. This is akin to standing on the sidelines whilst the competitive auction takes place on the pitch and then approaching the winner to see if any assistance is needed. Whilst feeding off the crumbs from someone else's table might bring reasonable business, it is not a growth strategy. There are good examples of companies who have followed this path, e.g., CDC, Unisys, ICL - and they are now characterized by having a legacy manufacturing business and trying to establish themselves as vendor independent IT services suppliers, even to the extent of undermining their own products to support this stance.
In my view, therefore, the future of OS/2 will be inextricably tied in to whether or not IBM decides it wants its share of the customer dollars being spent in the client/server/networking marketplace, or whether the company will be satisfied to take a back seat and exist off the services which fall out. I believe these sorts of considerations have played their part in generating recent analyst cautionary statements about IBM stock.
I just bought an IBM Intellistation Z Pro. Its hard drive had been dirtied with Windows. Nice Try. I was beginning to believe that I had no Operating System choice, other than going to LINUX. The only two drivers that did not come with Warp 4 were those for the Matrox card and the Crystal audio thing. I managed to find drivers for both and, I'm pleased to say, that Warp 4 is installed on this Intellistation which, by the way, is the first new personal workstation for ME in some years. The last one was a PS/2 Model 95-0KF which will go out of service after... oh... nine years once I get the Intellistation off the dining table and back upstairs where it belongs.
I also bought a NetFinity 5500-M20 about two months ago and installed OS/2 Warp Server for eBusiness on it. I was pleased that IBM had actually put some new jiblets in it. And, it would seem that this flavor of OS/2 will be supported.
I was diggin' in a box a few days ago. I was looking for a cable and I found two OS/2 buttons that I'd forgotton I had. I cheerfully pinned one on my shirt before I headed to a new account. They have a PC Server 330 running as a P/390. Its PC Operating System ??? OS/2!
Anyway, I hope you're wrong about OS/2 but, I'll be first in line to buy a product that doesn't have the Microsoft label on it. If its JAVA... well... we'll see.
Maybe it will be a good thing. I am getting a little tired of defending OS/2 to the unwashed. I was in a CompUSA wearing my OS/2 button and, this "kid" asked... "Whats OS/2?"
Film at eleven.
While he could not be as direct with answers regarding the client as he was about Server. I can halfway quote him with this.
One of the stumbling blocks for a Version 5 client at present is the need to support multiple languages....
IBM is not willing at this point to continue to pay for this. Thus the reason to farm out development and support of the V5 Client.
That does not mean that they are not working on a solution to this. It does mean that IBM would like to get paid for it's efforts.
They have not in the past just given up on their clients that have invested in them, and OS/2 is not different....
The Server has been redone and supports WSOD pretty good, as I have seen from demonstrations at WEW and from some of the clients I know that are using it.
If nothing else (or worst case scenario), a WSOD client that is affordable will come out if there is no major backer, or process taker for the Version 5 Client.
Go to Lou's Page and let them know what you think.
Please advise the readers of OS/2 CONNECT about connecting via IBM Global Services unless they use the right option of staying with, or in fact changing to, AT&T Business Internet Services by October 1st the accessing of the formerly IBM Global Network will be unavailable to OS/2 users due to the AT&T Worldnet dialer and mail programs:
A. Requiring that you log on with a specific dialer password, different from the mail password and linked to the mail account. (No more logging on through another account and getting your mail by just changing some preferences.)
B. The loss of out of region roaming.
As a former user of AT&T Worldnet services in the past I found it most unreliable in its claims of offering the world and I hope that the AT&T Business Internet Service they are offering will fill my needs that are adequately done with IBM.
So Timur... are you going to start an open source move to carry out the steps you outline?
I agree with you that it would be a great thing, but you make all-too-common mistake in thinking that IBM simply doesn't want to release the source and that's the only reason they haven't. Your editorial basically propogates one of the biggest pieces of OS/2 FUD today: that IBM is fully capable of releasing the source code but they won't because they don't want to promote OS/2 or because they have too strong of Windows focus.
The truth is, whether or not IBM wants to release the source code is irrelevant - the truth is that they CAN'T, for legal reasons. I used to work for IBM on OS/2 itself, and almost every file of source code of the OS/2 kernel is copyrighted by IBM and Microsoft. That's right - the OS/2 kernel is partially copyrighted by Microsoft.
And I'm sure there are other similar legal reasons keeping IBM from releasing the source code, but I don't know them all. I've had other IBM'ers also tell me, without revealing the specifics, that there are legal restrictions preventing the release of the source code.
So please, stop suggesting that an open-source version of OS/2 is a possibility. It is not.
One alternative to an open-source OS/2 that I've mentioned to some other OS/2 users is to modify Linux so that it can run OS/2 applications. It would not be easy, but there are only three steps:
1. Update the Linux kernel to support some of the advanced features of OS/2, like kernel-level threads.
2. Write a new loader for Linux so that Linux can load OS/2 EXE and DLL files into memory (much like Project Odin can load Win32 EXE's).
3. Port the OS/2 kernel/driver interfaces to OS/2, so that low-level DLL's like DOSCALL1.DLL can run.
Once you do these three things, Linux can run any OS/2 app, including the WPS. And if you package it correctly, you can create a new version of the OS/2 client that looks just like Warp 4 but uses the Linux kernel instead of the OS/2 kernel. And it will also use Linux device drivers instead of OS/2 drivers, which is a very big plus.
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