Slashdot Mirror
The Sad Parable of OS/2
Still-in-Mourning writes "IBM's first 32-bit version of its advanced PC operating system was released 10 years ago this month. It was better than anything around, yet it failed. Its hopes were pinned on many of the same things we hope today will bring Linux to the forefront. What lessons are to be learned? Will we learn them? A glimpse of a sorry chapter in computing history."
I'm sad to say it, but I think it's true. I was a hard core OS/2 user through OS/2 Warp (I think that was 2.1). It was very good, but when windows 95 came out and was more stable, plus had better application support, I couldn't see why I should continue using it. OS/2's windows compatibility only got worse over time.
Don't get me wrong, I wish OS/2 took over and we were all using it instead of windows, I think we'd be far better off.
Hopefully the linux world can learn something from that. If Microsoft ever gets the upper hand in the areas where Linux excels, it will be very bad for Linux. Not as bad as it was for OS/2 though, if for no other reason than the price of Linux.
That is...its our way or the highway.
Everyone took the highway.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Not even close. There were plenty of other operating systems and GUIs around at the time: NeXTStep, UNIX workstations and GUIs, Smalltalk-based systems, to name just a few.
NeXTStep alone beat OS/2 technologically in just about every area. The only major OS that OS/2 was clearly better than was DOS/Windows, but that was not exactly hard to do.
OS/2 was an attempt by IBM and Microsoft to corner the market with a proprietary operating system and proprietary APIs. It is poetic justice that the effort went down in flames as far as IBM was concerned. It is unfortunate that the effort succeeded as far as Microsoft is concerned, which apparently moved bits and pieces of OS/2 into NT.
The lesson to be learned from this? Either be the monopolist, or go with open source and open APIs. That's why IBM is pushing Linux now and Microsoft is pushing Windows.
How they survived those intervening 5 years is a long story, but it has a lot to do with IT people committing massive fraud and computers being horribly unreliable.
Heh, and now that MS has a stable OS, the apps have all gone down the shitter. You just can't win. Keeps the IT folks employed, though, so you win if you're a MSCE.
That's not totally true. I remember Super Bowl ads for it and a few ads in the months following it. Of course, that was a while before Windows 95, and for the most part, you are correct. The marketing I read and saw during the Windows 95 era was almost nonexistent.
What a great article. Just today, when I pulled up to the ATM machine and saw the beloved TRAP=0002 hex dump black screen of death, and I had to let out a little sniffle for my former fave OS.
Will Linux learn the lessons of OS/2? Who knows? For my time in OS/2, the company and the users were nice, knowedgeable, and professional. There were not many exaggerations and very few of Microsoft-style false promises. The lesson I got out of it is that consumers can't handle a straightforward approach, always going for smoke and mirrors and gold glitter sparkles. It doesn't matter if something exists, only that the something is "just around the corner."
I always hear people saying how they loved OS/2 and think everyone would be better off if it had "won" instead of windows.
However, I believe that it would be no different. It would still be open source v.s the big giant. The big giant would just be IBM instead of Microsoft. Don't forget they too are a huge gigantic corporation with no interest except profit just like MS.
Everyone would instead say "geez I miss windows. I wish it had won on the desktop instead of OS/2. Sure the application support wasn't as good. And OS/2 compatibility in win9x got a lot worse over time but it was still a far better OS IMO."
Think about it.
--
Garett
The author of the article seems to think that windows compatablity played a part in the death os os/2.
He argues that because programmers could make just one version that one run on both os's, they didnt bother marketing an os/2 only version, which would have be optimized for the os/2 platform.
I hope this isn't going to happen with wine/linux. Its quite obvious that windows programs will never quite work perfect in wine, and I hope developers dont use wine as an excuse to not bother developing linux applications.
Like Linux, many OS/2 users chose and stuck with their OS because they wanted, and because they changed.
OS/2 users often multibooted, and were quite familiar with Windows systems. Often far better than the Windows users themselves. :) This is in part because fixing the problems up in OS/2 often required a bit of poking around, and this habit passed onto fixing Windows systems.
What we do not really need is this "death threat" thing when advocates turned nasty.
OS/2 trives even now, not because of IBM or Microsoft, but, like Linux, because of the users themselves. It aims at a different market to Linux, but both have vigourous grass roots. No monopolist likes that :).
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
If IBM had the exclusive OEM contracts, then Windows95 would have been destroyed.
Why do people always ignore the illegal practices of Microsoft? IE is on top because it came with Windows.
Windows is on top because it comes with every PC.
Its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the OS itself, and its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the PC itself.
A user is not going to spend money on something they already have. Thats why OS2 didnt sell, why buy OS2 when you already have Windows?
Now, if Linux can manage to get OEM contracts, Linux can actually compete.
Apple couldnt / cant get OEM contracts so they sell their own Machines, Linux may have to sell their own box's to be successful, Sun did it, SGI did it, Apple does it, Linux may have to do this if they cant get OEM contracts.
The key is OEM contracts, thats the key.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
OS/2 was a truly great OS. The only other Truly Great OS I can think of is Mac OS X. "Linux+GNU utilities" is a very good OS for a number of reasons, but it's not particularly innovative.
:)
:)
:)
OS/2 2.0 (the first fully 32-bit version that also supported running more than one DOS session at one time) ran WELL on my 386sx-16 with 6 megs of RAM. Granted, it was slow as molasses, but I was able to run my BBS in one window and do other stuff without a problem. (I still remember my disgust when I tried to do this with Windows 3.0 on the same hardware - it didn't work well at ALL.) The environment was very graphically rich, and the jewel in the crown was the WorkPlace Shell, the likes of which I have yet to see on another OS (even BeOS didn't quite cut it).
The workplace shell was completely object-oriented; it was so far ahead of its time that most people had a really tough time understanding it which may have helped lead to its demise. You could drag "things" or "attributes" from programs to collections of objects, etc. I could open up the paint or font panel and "drag" color & typefaces over to any part of any open folder or application, and they would stick. The links were stored *in* the filesystem with the objects they affected, instead of a monolithic pseudo-database or oodles of unwieldy text files. As long as programs were written to take advantage of the object-oriented aspect of the WPS, it was a thing of beauty to watch how seamlessly everything worked together. (I used to spend hours customizing colors & fonts on all of my folders & windows by dragging... no OS since then has really been quite as fun to do this with, as they all "feel" very rigid and inflexible in comparison.") WPS also had the concept of templates as stacks of paper that you would literally rip off the top and fill in, not worrying about what the underlying application is. And WPS brought us the first tabbed-divider interfaces, which were pervasive throughout the system.
But OS/2 was released in a time when PC users were just starting to think graphically and Mac users were almost literally on another planet. Microsoft capitalized on this by releasing version after version of an OS that was essentially a menu-driven system overlaid on top of DOS. OS/2 was so advanced that people simply couldn't grasp its potential. And yes, people viewed IBM as "evil" at the time, and IBM sucked at marketing, etc...etc... there are really a ton of reasons why it didn't make it, but luckily I don't think most of them apply to Linux. No, Linux has a whole list of other problems that will hamper its adoption by the masses, but I digress.
It is a small consolation that OS/2 is still in heavy use in banks, and in Germany (I believe some user groups still exist there). They like their finely engineered products over there.
Like Mac OS X, (and unlike Windows or Linux) OS/2 wasn't simply a "list of features available in an OS" - it was designed from the ground up to deliver a complete & refined experience to the user. It disappeared into the background as you concentrated on the task at hand. It's what an OS should be. It's the last OS I ever used (until Mac OS X) that was truly a joy to use on a daily basis (and this includes several distributions of Linux).
It's nice that at least Apple finally gets this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Remember AmiPro? Now it's called WordPro, and it's a part of the IBM/Lotus office suite that comes with a lot of computers for free but never, ever gets installed or used. Ever. There was a time, however, when AmiPro was a serious, bona-fide competitor for MS Word. I used to use it on my 286 with Windows 3.0, and it was fantastic. It did everything, it gave me real WYSIWYG (something that I associated with seriously high-end apps like Ventura, but not Word), it was just great. IBM had been promising a native OS/2 version of AmiPro for ages, and this was it - the last hope, the last light for OS/2. This was still a viable product, people were still using it and paying actual MONEY for it, and this was the suite that could (maybe) save OS/2. The release was pushed back time and time again, and when AmiPro for OS/2 finally saw the light of day, everyone wanted to put it back in the ground. It was awful, buggy, evil stuff, didn't install properly, crashed non-stop, ate files, and just plain didn't work. That was when even the faithful started jumping ship. A working version of AmiPro could have made OS/2 an operating system that you could actually accomplish normal office tasks with, but instead gave MS-boosters yet another thing to point to when they dismissed it. Ahh well.
IBM's biggest mistake, though, was implementing Windows compatibility. This killed the application market. Why write for OS/2 when you could write for Windows (and OS/2 could then run your product under emulation)? Because of this, OS/2 could never, ever have had a "killer app."
RIP, OS/2. I wasted a lot of brain cells, time, and money on you. If IBM were smart, it would release all of your code under a BSD license, thus giving every one of Microsoft's competitors -- commercial or not -- a leg up. But, alas, I don't think it's that smart.
--Brett Glass
There's absolutely no doubt that OS/2 was a vastly superior product to Windows (and probably still is).
The only problem was that IBM really didn't have a very clever strategy for dealing with the competition from Microsoft.
Their single biggest mistake was to treat developers as a cash-cow rather than a valuable resource.
I did some development work for OS/2 and it cost me a fortune to tool up with all the necessary compilers, libraries, tools and documentation.
Most developers at the time already had the tools I needed to develop Windows 3 programs so it made little sense for IBM to raise a barrier to developers by charging like a wounded bull for its tools -- but they did.
IBM mistakenly thought that they could just spend $50 million on advertising the product to the end-user and ignore the needs, complaints and hearts of the developer community.
They paid dearly for this neglect -- simply because it resulted in a dearth of good quality "off the shelf" OS/2 applications to rival those offered for Windows.
Even worse, IBM kept touting its great ability to run Windows 3 programs alongside native OS/2 apps.
How smart was that? Not very!
Faced with IBM demanding outrageous prices for new tools (and even more outrageous upgrade fees for the same tools) -- or simply writing Windows code that OS/2 users could run anyway -- the choice was obvious.
Mainstream programmers kept pumping out Windows applications while almost completely ignoring OS/2. Oh sure, there were small groups of devout OS/2 developers who cherished the technical superiority of the operating system -- but that old catch-22 soon popped up.
Despite all that expensive advertising, consumers said "why buy OS/2 just to run Windows 3 software when you can buy Windows 3 for less?" Don't forget that OS/2 really needed about twice as much (expensive in 1992) RAM to properly run a Win3 program than did Win3 itself.
All in all, the public weren't about to pay extra without some real benefits -- and there wouldn't be any such benefits until there were enough native OS/2 apps to rival Windows apps.
And (here it comes) there wouldn't be enough native OS/2 apps until there were more OS/2 developers -- who were not about to fork out the price of a good used car just to write code for the tiny community of OS/2 users.
If IBM had half a brain they would have realised that the hurdle to the acceptance of any new OS is the availability of applications.
In stead of trying to screw big profits out of developers they should have given away their tools, SDKs, etc. This would have endeared them to the developer community (rather than alienate them as they did) and the result would likely have been some damned fine apps that matched Win3 versions for functionality and blew them away from a reliability perspective.
Of course this is what's happening now with Linux but I fear that it's simply too late to overtake the beast. Ten years ago there were many more large software companies and competing with Microsoft was hard but not impossible. These days you're sunk before you get your boat to the water.
Maybe 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing -- but I was telling them this ten years ago -- except they were so arrogant that they felt they didn't need to go out of their way to help developers and that end-users were far more important.
I was involved with the development and support of OS/2 products since its first release and I read all this praise and wonder what product did you people actually use. Okay interfase is a personal thing, I hated it if you liked it fine. But did you really look at the architecture it wasn't that robust as many would like to think. One misbehaving application could crash the entire system. As for Warp what a mess, I had to work with the IBM developers because our product that IBM used was crashing. Bottom line don't believe the OS/2 API things don't work as documented. Then Warp was a performance dog. IBM tried to hide it by speeding up all the interface code. but test timings on non-interface code and pre-Warp versions were faster. Even IBM wanted to kill OS/2 off years before they did, but for political reasons they couldn't. OS/2 was a nice idea, but bad implementation. No tears in the end.
How weird. I've had four computers in my life and none of them came with Windows.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
As far as I could tell, no one outside IBM was buying the PS/2. At least, I've never seen a single one outside the company. At the height of its popularity, it was estimated that OS/2 had over 10 million users.
IBM could have stayed ahead and taken over the industry, but a lot of factors conspired to prevent it from happening. Much of it was due to IBM attitude. First off, mainframe mentality ruled (And still rules, to a large extent) the company. Upper management still viewed the PC as a toy. Certainly they would never have dreamt that a user might actually want to multitask with it, even though OS/2 featured preemptive multitasking.
Further there was the IBM tendency to do a thing and then sit back and rest on their laurels. They go into maintenance mode and don't continue active research and development of innovative new features. IBM business process is still not geared toward a completed project where live development is still taking place.
As for marketing, well it is said that IBM couldn't market eternal life if they had sole rights. They had no idea of their target demographic and they tried to market the product to Joe Average User. This resulted in Joe Average User getting pissed off with the painful installation process. And the installation was painful. IBM could have done something about that, but they were resting on their laurels (See previous point.)
Furthermore, IBM's own software did not strive to show off the operating system at all. Most of the utilites they shipped were straight windows ports. This resulted in poor performance on the platform. I made a comment in a forum at one point that Netscape for Windows 3.1 actually did a better job of multi-threading than the OS/2 web explorer did. I actually ended up using the DOS version of the document explorer that IBM shipped for documentation because the OS/2 version would block the system input queue while it indexed documents, thus hanging the entire system.
Most people will agree that the death blow was PCCO's refusal to preload OS/2 on their systems (Due to illegal Microsoft bullying.) Since the install process never improved and there was no way to get the system preloaded, that was pretty much all she wrote.
There are still some companies out there using OS/2, and they're paying IBM a lot of money to maintain the product. It's mostly banks or other shops with other IBM iron. OS/2 always did talk to the mainframes very well. But OS/2 lost its chance to be a (or THE) mainstream desktop OS when Microsoft introduced Windows 95. Windows 95 was less stable, still didn't feature preemptive multitasking for all programs and had a far less robust interface, but it was good enough that most people didn't care.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The ISA machines in the PS/2 lineup came after some of IBM's major customers refused to buy a MCA version of the computer, I remember them later being re-named as PS/1 computers in an attempt to flog the PS/2. The MCA-based PS2 line did NOT survive until the mid 90's -- it was long dead by that time -- by the mid 90's IBM had migrated to PCI like everybody else, and had computers named "PS/2" but they were just generic clone machines.
I see no reason to do research about something I lived through when you're the only anal twit on Slashdot who cares. I'm sure that nobody else here cares that the PS/2 was released in 1987 rather than 1986. The point is that IBM was trying to hijack the personal computer market -- not that it was 1987 rather than 1986.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
1) Active developent continues. IBM was always terrified of breaking "legacy" application support, which is why there was never a proper fix to the Single System Input Queue problem.
2) There are practically no barriers of entry into Linux development. Compiler's free. Tons of libraries are free. Tons of programmers tools are free. The operating system is free. All the stuff that IBM charged you for and Microsoft charges you for, free, free, free. A 12 year old could afford to install the OS and tinker with it. Many do.
3) Marketing. Well... marketing in Linux is an interesting phenomenon. Largely it's word of mouth between clueful engineers. Linux takes a company over one computer at a time and management never has a clue. They just blink in their bovine way and ponder their managerial effectiveness which must be why no one ever complains about the file server crashing anymore...
4) Installation. Redhat install is pretty much point and click. The OS/2 install was painful. I did it for a living for a while. We had a document which specified the exact order in which you had to install our company's assorted software. Deviate at all from that order and you'd trash the Workplace shell and never get any icons, forcing you to fdisk, format and reinstall. The installation process was guaranteed to take 8 hours. I'd prefer Linux installs any day of the week.
The main thing is the system keeps evolving, bugs keep getting fixed, Linus doesn't mind doing major revisions if he thinks a design isn't right and if you ever have a question, you can always ask the guy who wrote the package you're having trouble with (Assuming you can find him.) Other factors might potentially kill Linux (I could see it getting made illegal in the current legal climate) but repeats of OS/2's mistakes will not be a factor.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, it was (gasp) MICROSOFT (gasp). Think about that before you flame!
Actually this isn't exactly true. Originally IBM did contract MS to write OS/2 however by the time they reached version 3 Windows started to gain in popularity so they focused on that and IBM took over OS/2 entirely. If you read the second link a little more carefully it claims IBM re-wrote everything starting from the 1.x base. That became OS/2 Warp and MS took said version 3 and renamed it to Windows NT.
Classic IBM Marketing Disaster. Big National Championship game, everyone's tuning in. Put something incomprehensible like "OS/2" in the middle of the football field, and then run lots of commercials for something called "Ultimedia" with mimes dancing around.
I imagine that Joe Sixpack was dumbfounded, it didn't sell a single copy of OS/2, but lots of fatcat IBM customers got boxseats for the game.
Just shows you professors can make utterly moronic statements. I'd wager he had never even seen, never mind used the OS.
There is one very simple reason to why OS/2 failed and Windows did not. Microsoft gave their all to make Windows win, they didn't have hardware sales to worry about as well. Just as Sun today are not willing to put all their eggs in one basket with Java but also wants to push slow expensive hardware and an outdated OS.
To win you have to want to win, bad. For this is what Bill and Steve wants to, they want to give people what they want (that is normal people, they don't want to pay extra for a bunch of stuff, they want one package, and have all they need. I want that too, and I consider myself a computer geek after all) and they want to win. Though I personally don't think they try to be some "evil empire" and gets accused of a lot of things they haven't done. Anyone dealing with software on that scale knows how hard it is, and interfaces etc are bound to change. Heck, free software is even worse.
So, this turned into a rant again. So for all you linuxnerds out there. If "Linux" is going to succeed, Mandrake/SuSE/RedHat/etc better join forces and put all their eggs in one basket. Produce one OS that looks and works the same all the time (you won't get away with several desktops, Apple and Microsoft is going to tear you to shreds, with good reasons) with a good set of applications and tools to go with it. Yes, to integrate and bundle *IS* good for the consumer. Anyone who says anything else must be mad. I buy a car, not a bunch of parts to build a car with (we all know the cost for that).
Boo hoo
IBM has been clueless about what a PC OS is since the beginning. The last thing I'd ever want to see is them controlling the PC OS monopoly.
At least Microsoft has had a vision, and knows they have to be ready to change it on the fly. Stop blaming Microsoft for the mid-east crisis, terrorism and the leaning tower of pisa, and find a way to beat them.