John puts the cart before the horse in stating that Windows 95 would
be nowhere without the applications that were available for it. This
is not reality.
About 6-7 years ago, Windows was only on a fraction of the PCs. Most
applications were DOS based. OS/2 was introduced around that time, and
had a shot at being the PC leader. Apple with the Mac was also in a
great position to take and keep, the GUI industry. Unfortunately for
OS/2 and MacOS, they did not have the tenacity that Bill Gates and
Microsoft exhibited and still exhibit to this day with regards to
Windows. IBM's wishy-washiness vis-à-vis OS/2 is something to behold.
I guess Big Blue just never really wanted to get away from the big
iron with the blinking lights and the spinning tapes. The AS/400 and
the RS6000 are about as small as they wanted to go with OSes. Apple
and its amazing mismanagement simply gave away the farm, or rather,
let the farm get wrestled away from them.
Today, Windows IS the PC industry and is carving a large share of the
server business. OS/2 Warp on PowerPC was finally abandoned by IBM
and OS/2 on other platforms is dying quickly. I predict that within 3
years OS/2 will be gone. As for Apple, their share of the market is
extremely small and their core bastions are being assaulted and slowly
taken over by Windows. To believe otherwise denotes a bad case of
wishful thinking and ostrich-like behavior. Their recent
announcements and desperation moves are only confusing their
supporters. Rhapsody may turn out to be a requiem by 1999.
On the desktop front, UNIX is losing its luster very quickly. The
sales of desktop UNIX took a 10% dive last year and will probably take
another dive this year. Windows NT is proving to be an irresistible
force on the desktop. With inexpensive Pentium Pro and the new
Pentium II (with or without the new bug), cheap memory, inexpensive
capacious disk drives and software being migrated from UNIX to NT at
an ever increasing rate, desktop UNIX is in big trouble.
On the server front, UNIX is still touted as a resilient, stable OS
(what a laugh), but this is not as strident as it was even six months
ago. Now, UNIX is promoted as being more scalable than NT. This will
work, for a time. But as people come to understand distributed
processing and the ease of adding NT servers to the network as needed,
the argument will lose it strength. In 1998, NT 5.0 will start to hit
the streets with its new features. Intel will be nearing the release
of Merced and you can bet HP will have some pretty fantastic
NetServers ready and waiting. DEC will not stay quiet either. Their
Alphas will probably be getting close to the Gigahertz, if they
haven't already reached it by then. By 1999, UNIX will be in full
retreat.
We probably will witness wholesale dumping of so-called legacy
applications due to the Y2K boobytrap. Many companies will switch to
a new application rather than spend incredible amounts of money fixing
older code. A lot of these legacy applications will be found on
UNIX-based systems. I suspect many companies will pick that time to
move to a newer OS along with the new applications.
During the final year of the millenium, as we dust ourselves off from
the Y2K chaos now behind us, we will see books and movies of the week
on "How I survived the Year 2000 Syndrome", and we will be amazed at
how much the industry will have changed in just a few short, indeed
very short years.
It would have been nice to have a portable HP 3000, a few years ago,
and maybe even now. However, I fear it is too late to start
considering it now. I have resolved myself at never seeing it. I
take solace in the fact that my 922LX will be supported after the year
2000. However, it is not too late to ask for an HPDP (HP Developers
Package).
It takes more than applications for an operating system to succeed, it
takes tenacity, resolve and fortitude from the vendor. It requires
the vendor to have an unshakable belief in their OS and the uniform
commitment from all echelons of the company. This is the case at
Microsoft. This is currently not the case at any other OS vendor of
which I am aware. In the fullness of time, something else will come
along, but not in this century.
Kind regards,
Denys. . .
Denys Beauchemin
Hicomp America, Inc.
[log in to unmask] www.hicomp.com/hicomp
(800) 323-8863 (281) 288-7438 fax: (281) 355-6879
-----Original Message-----
From: John D. Alleyn-Day [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 1997 2:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Support cost for small systems
I've changed my mind. If anyone has anything to say about small
systems
and whether they have any interest in them, please post it to this
list.
It would be interesting to have a discussion on this issue, following
up on
the discussions at IPROF, if only to let HP know that we are still
interested.
The big hangup seems to be the cost of support, which for a developer
with
subsystems such as COBOL, Fortran, etc. gets absolutely prohibitive.
It
seems to me that HP needs to take a leaf from Microsoft's book and
give
some real support to small developers, providing them with
development
systems with everything they need to produce software applications at
a low
price. Even if they make a loss on it, they can charge it off to
marketing, because it's the applications that will be selling the
HP3000s.
Windows 95 would be nowhere if there hadn't been lots of readily
available
applications for it. The lack of applications is probably the
biggest
reason why OS/2 can't compete.
So, who out there is interested in such a small development system?
If you
are, make a noise!
John D. Alleyn-Day
Alleyn-Day International
408-286-6421 408-286-6474 (Fax)
[log in to unmask] http://www.Alleyn-Day.com
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