Hi there all you OS/2 fanatics! Yep, it's the nut on the southern tip of Africa again. I hope you all had a good OS/2 month!
Unfortunately, I must start with bad news this week. After all my efforts and faxes and e-mails the Cape Town OS/2 user group is dead! Well, almost dead. After nearly five years I've decided that there are just not enough participants to make the group viable anymore. I'm going to try once more in about three or four months from now, and if the outcome is still not good enough, well, need I say more.
But, even with only a small group (12 people) at the last meeting, it was very good. The kind of discussions and information sharing was very good, but in the end the group decided that it was just not fair to everyone if the group is too small. Some members drive every month more than 50 kilometers to attend, and if they do not get something out of it, it just is not worth the effort.
I will however keep my mailing list going for everyone that is still interested in receiving interesting OS/2 information. If you want to join the list, let me know at fmec@iafrica.com.
Now over to something I promised last month. Why is OS/2 not making it very big out there, and what is going to happen in the next couple of years? Just remember, everything I say here is only my own opinion and sometimes not even my own opinion, but something I pick up from talking to a lot of people. Everyone that know me knows that I always have a lot to say about OS/2 and why OS/2 is the best and so on and so on. You must see me in front of a crowd at a noisy computer show...
Well, why is there only about 15,000,000 OS/2 licenses out there, and not 50,000,000 plus? We all know that technically OS/2 is the best. For "openness," robustness, "connectedness" and good performance it also gets very good, if not the best, points. But is that everything we look for in a good operating system? Well, clearly the figures show a different picture!
Now if I listen to a lot of people around me, and I must admit some of their ideas aren't too bad, a lot of the problems start with, yes, I must say it, it starts with IBM. One of the things that the users called for from the very first release was ease of installation. The first release that rolled out big time, 1.3, was an absolute nightmare to install. I can still remember the long nights I spent trying to figure out how to do this and how to do that. One thing you must remember is that I live in South Africa, and during those years South Africa was still one of the "stinking" countries of the world. A lot of big companies, including IBM left the country, and sometimes it was a little bit hard to get support, any support. And the Internet was just something we read about in the international mags.
And then 2.0 and 2.1 hit the world. Great new interface, if you could get the bugger to install. Believe me, it WAS a challenge to install it on the average cheap clone. At least this time around it worked more or less on IBM PCs (remember Micro Channel?). I must say 2.11 was a great improvement and a lot of companies rolled out big time on 2.11. It was more or less this time that the small user also got to know about OS/2, and I think OS/2 2.x was installed in many homes around the world. But, unfortunately, this also implied that there was many more hardware components out there that tried to survive the OS/2 intricacies. Within a year everyone and his dog was screaming for drivers and drivers and drivers. Then the next wave of screaming started, "WHERE ARE THE APPLICATIONS?" In my mind I think that this time was actually the crucial time. IBM could have won the battle there, yes, right there with the 2.x range. Microsoft was many years behind in the technology and there was a window of at least two years. If IBM had only used one year to produce lots and lots of drivers and if they could only convince a handful of other mainstream companies to wrote apps for OS/2, then I believe they could have done a lot better. IBM could even have used their excellent programmers and inside knowledge to write a suite or two themselves. But no, they instead decided to spent money and time on V3 and make the gap even bigger between OS/2 and Windows. In my opinion, that was the critical error, and unfortunately, that time is gone forever.
One other thing that is hurting OS/2 today as well is IBM's stated position that OS/2 is aimed at primarily at middle to large corporations. "Sorry for all you small guys, but no more marketing to you and almost no support for you either."
There is a handful more of these items to discuss, but unfortunately, my time is running out.
Remember to tune in again next month. Then I will write something about what is counting in OS/2's favor and why it will be around for many years to come. In fact, I believe it will outlive Win95, maybe not NT, but definitely Win95 as we know it today.
Have fun and support the Cape Town Olympic bid for 2004! Remember, we are now in the last five, and we'll MAKE IT !!!
Please do not hesitate to send me any news and information pertaining to South Africa you would like mentioned in this column.
Francois van der Merwe was the South African Country Coordinator for the "Connect the World with Merlin" project. He is also an active member of the OS/2 Users Group in Cape Town and Team OS/2.
