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IBM's OS/2 Strategy for 2003

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-dead-yet dept.

Landreth writes "OS2World.com reports that IBM has released their OS/2 strategy for 2003. They appear to be pushing the WebSphere Software Platform as well as client and server upgrades to Warp 4. The report can be viewed at IBM's website."

4 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Getting OS/2 by bjb · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've been wondering for the last few years, who still uses OS/2? Forget companies who have legacy software running on it, I mean does anyone actually use it on their personal machine? I mean regularly; enough to validate upgrades.

    The bigger question I have, however, is that I never really had a chance to play with OS/2, and I always wanted to see what it was like. Is it even publically (preferably freely) available for a weekend hobbyist like myself who just wants to kick the tires?

    --
    Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
  2. Re:who honestly cares by reaper20 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On the otherhand if I was a past OS/2 customer I would be pretty happy with the length of support by IBM so far. You gotta hand it to IBM on this one, they supported the product as long as the customers needed, and that's pretty rare in this day and age of forced upgrades.

    I mean, they even have OS/2 Mozilla - at least they weren't told their systems were out of date and force them to upgrade every 18 months. (Oracle/Microsoft).

  3. Change of plans.. by Plutor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I thought IBM's OS/2 plan for 2003 was kill it. Why has this changed?

  4. I save big bucks with OS/2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    all the desktops in my architecture practice run OS/2, the servers run linux, and we have one copy of windows running on VMWare. I set up the os/2 boxes when warp connect appeared on the scene, ('93?) and have never looked back. Other than updating Os/2 to warp 4 our software upgrade costs have been virtually zero. They are zero because we don't run windows programs. We are never forced into an upgrade situation.We use a mix of DOS (oh the horror!) OS/2 and linux GPL programs.The last versions of many DOS programs before the big switch to windows (word perfect, quattro pro, generic cadd etc) were really very good pieces of work. OS/2 allows perfectly stable multitasking of these programs.

    We use HOBlink to add an X server to the OS/2 desktop, and now we can also use OS/2 as a thin client for various Linux programs.

    Nothing crashes. we don't get viruses, nobody is playing games when they should be working, and picking up additional copies of programs we need is trivial on e-bay.

    That being said, our backup plan is to migrate totaly to Linux if OS/2 ever really dies. The only thing keeping us from doing that now, is lack of a good Reasonably inexpensive CAD program that runs on Linux.

    We are just going to skip the whole windows think