I like that part about complaining that PIMs are separate apps but then they want a separate panel with PIM features that will stay running when the email is closed.... Sounds just like a separate PIM app to me. OK, so they added a feature to show how many messages are in your inbox. Big wooop.
You're stuck. LookOut was only created because Netscape was threatening Microsofts monopoly and now that the've killed that threat, why do they have to change anything? IMO, the only changes you will likely have in LookOut is not going to be seen because it will be hidden in the protocols to eliminate the non-Microsoft server and force MS servers for use with all corporate email.
You play by their rules and you stagnate by their rules. Send your request to MS and see what that gets you.;/
The Polarbar Mailer does virtual folders too but so far I can't figure out how to "dock" the folder into my message tree.
I think this guy has a great idea and I think it could be the start of an message dbase that every app could use for contact information too. I hate that every app has it's own contact information....
Wouldn't it be cool to blow CNET's mind and prototype this UltimateMailer in the OSS world instead of the closed source software world.
good point and most likely correct too. I guess the big difference here is that the device vendor gets to mold the software/OS to the device instead of the other way around ( as it is with MS WinCE ). There also that little bit about not having the OS vendor clubbing you if you don't sing their company song every morning.
it's about standards and openness. Sharp picked the right way to go for a new product such as the Zaurus. IMHO.
I'm with you, the PalmOS/UI is well done from a users view. The Zaurus/QPE is getting there. Earlier we had to tap-tap an address item to get it to open and now they have it a single tap. I'd like to see it go into edit mode by tapping on the expanded view (like the Palm address app).
I think what's going on here is that this is a full featured OS and API so it reflects the desktop too much. The PalmOS is coming at it from the other way. I know of WinCE users who switched to Palm because they were tapping too many times to get there data and stopping apps was a pain.
It'll get there and it'll take less than the 4 years it took Microsoft to get where it is today. Crashing on a PDA is not acceptable. My Palm PDA crashed maybe twice a year and I expect this from the Zaurus. Microsoft isn't there yet and may never be.
Remember that the price will keep this away from many users but business geeks will bring this into the office just like how Palm started. IMO.
We shall see but I think Sharp made the right choice. My friends attempting products for the iPaqs complain constantly about the crashes and the size when expansion is needed (most always).
What Sharp is attempting is to not just be an also-ran and put MS WinCE(PPC2002) on this or become another PalmOS device with limited hardware resources. Yes they don't come out of the gate with tons of apps but they provided an open platform by going with Linux, Java, and Qt(kinda).
I think it would help if they were shipping a bootable CDROM with the device which would run Linux and the developement tools without needing to be installed on the PC. Just mounting a HD for saving the source code. Even MS Windows developers should see how easy it is to develope for the Z. $2000 for a comercial license to develope is too high IMHO but at least the prototypes can be done cheaply.
Anyway, Sharp has dared to provide a pocket PC that doesn't require a MS tax and leaves the door open to developers and users. Look where the Windows based pocket PCs are today? It's been 4 years and they have less than 20% marketshare. And I know one company who bought 5 just to make sure one worked for the demos. Linux was a good choice. IMHO
President of the USA to alien:
"what do you want us to do?"
Alien to President of the USA:
"Die"
Please Microsoft, pull your OS from the market and close this chapter on killing every innovative company that doesn't sing the Microsoft Corporate song.
Only a very few business purchase large blocks of PC's and can have a particular Microsoft OS installed on it or buy it without an OS. A very few. Most are stuck with getting what is part of the "package" and it's gonna include this years version of Microsoft Windows. Business's don't like to support many different versions of the OS so every couple/three years they have to do a mass upgrade to get everyone on the same version.
But you are correct, they don't HAVE TO upgrade but there sure is a lot of pressure to do so and 99% of that comes from Microsoft. It's their business model. By the way, the same goes for the Microsoft applications too. If it's not incompatible file formats it's some other thing that PUSHES you to upgrade to their latest version. Getting preloads is the mostly how they do it. You'd have to pay twice just to keep your new PC's current with your old ones.
I really loved that bit about MS Windows 95 not having USB as a good reason to get MS Windows 98. And the bit about MS Win95 and MS Win98 not being Y2K compliant was fantastic. Only when the big boys complained did MS patch MS Win95. That time the club got turned around but that doesn't happen near enough. IMHO.
By the way, I don't run Windows anymore. I used to help my friends with their computers, MS Windows, but had to start charging them because of constant unexplained crashes or "events". Visiting got to suck really bad and now it's enjoyable again. Except when they complain about MS Windows....
If business's want to save money then they should get as far away from Microsoft as they can. IMHO.
You brought up a good point and one I'm sure Microsoft would not want to see in the press.
You mention the $50 an OEM might pay but there is much more. Keeping MS Windows running isn't cheap and being forced to upgrade the OS and MS apps every 1.5 years doesn't help either. Let's not forget those wonderful security features Microsoft has built into MS Windows for you. That's right, you should include the cost for that virus software too. And that only catches the virus after you've been infected since MS Windows gets infected so quickly. I think it was estimated that over $10 billion dollars were lost do to MS Windows virus infections over the last couple of years. Keeping that registry fixed up isn't cheap either.
Keeping a business running on MS Windows is like keeping your car running by giving a crocked neighborhood mechanic your checkbook. You start it up and it's gonna cost ya....
Actually, this could be the only way Microsoft can knock Linux off it's growth route. Think about it, If a bunch of vendors start moving to the Win32 based WINE, it only means that Microsoft needs to go and tweak the API's again( already had 10+ years of that ). OR, Microsoft could come out with a MS-Linux with thier own REAL Win32 subsystem for their Linux and again, all the apps/API's are under Win32 and under their control.
Personally, I hope that WINE is always, just broken enough so the big apps need to go native. If it's Qt or whatever, native is what we need in the long haul. IMHO.
I'm with you. As long as Microsoft controls the Win32 APIs these products will only get you legacy support and present another reason NOT to port to the LSB. If Microsoft lost control of Win32 then this would be great.
**** History lesson **** Microsoft [product x] isn't done until [competitors product y] doesn't run.
nice little story but you probably got mod'ed down because it has nothing to do with how Dell refused to support their hardware if another OS was on it.
It reminds me of RoadRunner having a DNS server down but them not supporting me as soon as I told them I was NOT running Windows. Microsoft paid for RoadRunners support. I have feeling that Dell is paid by Microsoft also for such support. It sure looks that way, doesn't it?
From what I hear, IBM was a very bad monopoly and might have been just as bad as Microsoft. We'll never know because the choice was not given to us. You had to be a techie or REALLY want to install OS/2 in order to run it.
How IBM got the source to Win16 but still had to pay Microsoft for every copy of WinOS2 sold in OS/2. I heard that many times from IBM people. I'm sure it was negotiated when Microsoft and IBM broke up their partnership. IBM monopolies had nothing to do with it since they had none.
No, it was mainly to give NT it's networking back in the rev 1.0 (3.1) days. Microsoft owned Lan Manager and it was a 16bit OS/2 server process. They eventually wrote native NT networking into NT but it was probably not until v4.0 that the OS/2 subsystem wasn't used much.
I remember loading the wrong file on Photoshop for Windows 3.x and not being able to stop it for something like 15 minutes. No multitasking and no multithreading, just the hourglass. At least with OS/2, I could have killed that WinOS2 session. Multi-threaded apps are FANTASTIC but it took Microsoft about 7 years to finally get that working in desktop Windows.
I also thought I read somewhere about a graphics developer porting their app to OS/2 and Microsoft telling them to kill it because it ran better on OS/2 than it did on Windows 3.x. It was killed and the Windows 95 app came out something like 3 years later.
A Microserf wrote the HPFS filesystem too. Windows NT v3.1 and 4.0 apps ran faster on the HPFS filesystem than they did on HPFS. I found this out running the Watcom compiler on a dualboot system when doing a proof-of-concept port of an OS/2 app to NT 4.0. Now why didn't they support HPFS in NT? Could it be that it had SOMETHING to do with OS/2?
I wonder why they called the hpfs driver PINBALL.SYS????
Microsoft will do anything to keep it's monopoly. Look at how they spread the browser all over the OS and even into the installation process. Brilliant I say, brilliant. NOT.
I still think I have my 20-something Consensus UNIX floppies. That was a pain too but once installed on a 386, both OS/2 and UNIX did a nice job multi-tasking.
Oh, how many nights I remember spent installing floppies...... Thanks for that memory. NOT.:)
get gtar and make a bootable floppy with it on it. put a backup hard disk in the system and just tar the entire OS/2 filesystem from / to your backup hard disk.
If you ever have a crash, just fix the failure and then boot from the floppy, format the hard hard disk if needed and extract the tar file to it. I loved the fact that OS/2 could be restored completely from tape and run. I used to do this about every two years just to make sure my filesystem wasn't too fragmented.
Good point. I really hoped that OpenDOC would have taken off too. I used HP's NewWave way back when and a data-centric system is the best. IMHO.
I see KDE is picking up some of this with KParts and I hope it really takes off. Just like Linux is far more stable as a component-based OS, applications will be far better when components do specific tasks. Think about it, why do we need a spell checker in every application? It's wasteful.
I had OS/2 machines running v2.1 with TCP/IP, X11, and Netware. We paid around $200 for the TCP/IP and PMX Server but on 10MB of memory it was a kick arse desktop compared to Dos/Windows.
Our UNIX guys couldn't believe a PC could do what OS/2 did. Heck, Texas Instruments had a multi-DSP design board that used OS/2's multi-tasking to debug in realtime the DSP board. Again, the techies were loven what OS/2 could do. The catch was that the department manager had a system we just could not get OS/2 installed on. I forget what it was but since he could not run it on his desktop it didn't make to onto more than a dozen systems.
I think NextSTEP was in another league at the time. OS/2 was still very much a DESKTOP OS while the others were either workstation or server OS's.
I ran MicroPort UNIX on my 286 and Consensus UNIX System V on my 386 but X11 was a few years away still and the desktop hardware just wasn't quite powerfull enough at the time. Going from UNIX to OS/2 was a real pleasure. I had a very short time with DOS/Windows between UNIX and OS/2 with some NT beta's in there before running with OS/2.
You know Microsoft originally marketed NT as the replacement for DOS/Windows until they realized it was a bloated pig and moved the marketing to say it was a "workstation" OS. In 1991, Microsoft told me to wait for Chicago for the next great desktop OS from Microsoft.
I'm with you that the OS should be opensource. It's time.
WinG huh? It wasn't until IBM showed ID's Doom running in a window on OS/2 that Microsoft got off their ars and build WinG. IBM build DIVE with IDs help but something happened in the process and ID dropped out of the partnership. I think it had to do with culture clashes. Just a guess. From what I remember, there were huge groups of people around the OS/2, Doom-in-a-window demos at COMDEX.
Gesh, OS/2 v3.0 had OpenGL support builtin too, though it never got hardware OGL support.
There is very little, if anything, Microsoft ever did first in the computer industry. Most was just copied and they dominated by the anti-competitive leveraging of their monopoly. IMHO.
Not a monopoly in 1994? You are right that the courts didn't RULE they were one but they did sign a consent decree in 1994 with the DOJ. The Justice overseeing the case looked it over and refused to sign it because it didn't do enough to stop Microsofts strong-arming tactics. Judge Sporkin was removed from the case and Judge Jackson was handed the case and told to sign it. He did.
Judge Jackon is the same Judge Jackson who got the latest case and was he pissed to see what Microsoft did with the first decree.
Not a monopoly? With billions in cash there seems to be no law you are accountable to. Or so it seems.
Did you know that USAG Ashcroft received more money from Microsoft than from Enron?
LoB
Re:Win95 didnt kill OS2, Microsoft did.
on
The Sad Parable of OS/2
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Don't forget, in 1995 Microsoft did have a monopoly on PC OS's and what they did to make Windows 95 apps NOT run under OS/2 was anti-competitive and illegal. Microsoft built Windows 95 to load a few resources up at the 1GB memory address just to prevent OS/2 from running Windows 95 apps just like it ran Windows 3.x apps. You see, OS/2 could ONLY access 512MB of address space.
Let's not forget that in Nov 1994, at COMDEX, HP had 50% of their PC's running OS/2 the night before the show opened. Bill Gates made a phone call and by morning, NO HP computers were running OS/2.
The list goes on. I blame IBM 10% for OS/2 not gaining more market share and the other 90% was Microsofts anti-competitive nature to do ANYTHING to prevent the consumer from making the choice.
Speaking of choice, do you remember that Microsoft threatened to pull out of COMDEX because IBM was doing it's keynote speech about choices unless IBMs timeslot was moved to reduce the viewers. I think IBM dropped out of COMDEX the following year and all since.
Think about it. It took MIcrosoft 10 years to build a version of Windows that is close to OS/2 v2.0... well maybe v2.1 is a better comparison since it had better legacy Windows support and the 32bit graphics system updates. TEN YEARS!
WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY??? With Microsoft? Nyet.
Slashdot Mirror
I like that part about complaining that PIMs are separate apps but then they want a separate panel with PIM features that will stay running when the email is closed.... Sounds just like a separate PIM app to me. OK, so they added a feature to show how many messages are in your inbox. Big wooop.
LoB
You're stuck. LookOut was only created because Netscape was threatening Microsofts monopoly and now that the've killed that threat, why do they have to change anything? IMO, the only changes you will likely have in LookOut is not going to be seen because it will be hidden in the protocols to eliminate the non-Microsoft server and force MS servers for use with all corporate email.
;/
You play by their rules and you stagnate by their rules. Send your request to MS and see what that gets you.
LoB
The Polarbar Mailer does virtual folders too but so far I can't figure out how to "dock" the folder into my message tree.
I think this guy has a great idea and I think it could be the start of an message dbase that every app could use for contact information too. I hate that every app has it's own contact information....
Wouldn't it be cool to blow CNET's mind and prototype this UltimateMailer in the OSS world instead of the closed source software world.
LoB
good point and most likely correct too. I guess the big difference here is that the device vendor gets to mold the software/OS to the device instead of the other way around ( as it is with MS WinCE ). There also that little bit about not having the OS vendor clubbing you if you don't sing their company song every morning.
it's about standards and openness. Sharp picked the right way to go for a new product such as the Zaurus. IMHO.
LoB
I'm with you, the PalmOS/UI is well done from a users view. The Zaurus/QPE is getting there. Earlier we had to tap-tap an address item to get it to open and now they have it a single tap. I'd like to see it go into edit mode by tapping on the expanded view (like the Palm address app).
I think what's going on here is that this is a full featured OS and API so it reflects the desktop too much. The PalmOS is coming at it from the other way. I know of WinCE users who switched to Palm because they were tapping too many times to get there data and stopping apps was a pain.
It'll get there and it'll take less than the 4 years it took Microsoft to get where it is today. Crashing on a PDA is not acceptable. My Palm PDA crashed maybe twice a year and I expect this from the Zaurus. Microsoft isn't there yet and may never be.
Remember that the price will keep this away from many users but business geeks will bring this into the office just like how Palm started. IMO.
LoB
We shall see but I think Sharp made the right choice. My friends attempting products for the iPaqs complain constantly about the crashes and the size when expansion is needed (most always).
What Sharp is attempting is to not just be an also-ran and put MS WinCE(PPC2002) on this or become another PalmOS device with limited hardware resources. Yes they don't come out of the gate with tons of apps but they provided an open platform by going with Linux, Java, and Qt(kinda).
I think it would help if they were shipping a bootable CDROM with the device which would run Linux and the developement tools without needing to be installed on the PC. Just mounting a HD for saving the source code. Even MS Windows developers should see how easy it is to develope for the Z. $2000 for a comercial license to develope is too high IMHO but at least the prototypes can be done cheaply.
Anyway, Sharp has dared to provide a pocket PC that doesn't require a MS tax and leaves the door open to developers and users. Look where the Windows based pocket PCs are today? It's been 4 years and they have less than 20% marketshare. And I know one company who bought 5 just to make sure one worked for the demos. Linux was a good choice. IMHO
LoB
It reminds me of "Independence Day" the movie....
President of the USA to alien:
"what do you want us to do?"
Alien to President of the USA:
"Die"
Please Microsoft, pull your OS from the market and close this chapter on killing every innovative company that doesn't sing the Microsoft Corporate song.
:?
LoB
Only a very few business purchase large blocks of PC's and can have a particular Microsoft OS installed on it or buy it without an OS. A very few. Most are stuck with getting what is part of the "package" and it's gonna include this years version of Microsoft Windows. Business's don't like to support many different versions of the OS so every couple/three years they have to do a mass upgrade to get everyone on the same version.
But you are correct, they don't HAVE TO upgrade but there sure is a lot of pressure to do so and 99% of that comes from Microsoft. It's their business model. By the way, the same goes for the Microsoft applications too. If it's not incompatible file formats it's some other thing that PUSHES you to upgrade to their latest version. Getting preloads is the mostly how they do it. You'd have to pay twice just to keep your new PC's current with your old ones.
I really loved that bit about MS Windows 95 not having USB as a good reason to get MS Windows 98. And the bit about MS Win95 and MS Win98 not being Y2K compliant was fantastic. Only when the big boys complained did MS patch MS Win95. That time the club got turned around but that doesn't happen near enough. IMHO.
By the way, I don't run Windows anymore. I used to help my friends with their computers, MS Windows, but had to start charging them because of constant unexplained crashes or "events". Visiting got to suck really bad and now it's enjoyable again. Except when they complain about MS Windows....
If business's want to save money then they should get as far away from Microsoft as they can. IMHO.
LoB
You brought up a good point and one I'm sure Microsoft would not want to see in the press.
You mention the $50 an OEM might pay but there is much more. Keeping MS Windows running isn't cheap and being forced to upgrade the OS and MS apps every 1.5 years doesn't help either. Let's not forget those wonderful security features Microsoft has built into MS Windows for you. That's right, you should include the cost for that virus software too. And that only catches the virus after you've been infected since MS Windows gets infected so quickly. I think it was estimated that over $10 billion dollars were lost do to MS Windows virus infections over the last couple of years. Keeping that registry fixed up isn't cheap either.
Keeping a business running on MS Windows is like keeping your car running by giving a crocked neighborhood mechanic your checkbook. You start it up and it's gonna cost ya....
LoB
Actually, this could be the only way Microsoft can knock Linux off it's growth route. Think about it, If a bunch of vendors start moving to the Win32 based WINE, it only means that Microsoft needs to go and tweak the API's again( already had 10+ years of that ). OR, Microsoft could come out with a MS-Linux with thier own REAL Win32 subsystem for their Linux and again, all the apps/API's are under Win32 and under their control.
Personally, I hope that WINE is always, just broken enough so the big apps need to go native. If it's Qt or whatever, native is what we need in the long haul.
IMHO.
LoB
I'm with you. As long as Microsoft controls the Win32 APIs these products will only get you legacy support and present another reason NOT to port to the LSB. If Microsoft lost control of Win32 then this would be great.
**** History lesson ****
Microsoft [product x] isn't done
until [competitors product y] doesn't run.
LoB
nice little story but you probably got mod'ed down because it has nothing to do with how Dell refused to support their hardware if another OS was on it.
It reminds me of RoadRunner having a DNS server down but them not supporting me as soon as I told them I was NOT running Windows. Microsoft paid for RoadRunners support. I have feeling that Dell is paid by Microsoft also for such support. It sure looks that way, doesn't it?
LoB
why didn't you state where you think I'm incorrect?
From what I hear, IBM was a very bad monopoly and might have been just as bad as Microsoft. We'll never know because the choice was not given to us. You had to be a techie or REALLY want to install OS/2 in order to run it.
How IBM got the source to Win16 but still had to pay Microsoft for every copy of WinOS2 sold in OS/2. I heard that many times from IBM people. I'm sure it was negotiated when Microsoft and IBM broke up their partnership. IBM monopolies had nothing to do with it since they had none.
No, it was mainly to give NT it's networking back in the rev 1.0 (3.1) days. Microsoft owned Lan Manager and it was a 16bit OS/2 server process. They eventually wrote native NT networking into NT but it was probably not until v4.0 that the OS/2 subsystem wasn't used much.
LoB
I remember loading the wrong file on Photoshop for Windows 3.x and not being able to stop it for something like 15 minutes. No multitasking and no multithreading, just the hourglass. At least with OS/2, I could have killed that WinOS2 session. Multi-threaded apps are FANTASTIC but it took Microsoft about 7 years to finally get that working in desktop Windows.
I also thought I read somewhere about a graphics developer porting their app to OS/2 and Microsoft telling them to kill it because it ran better on OS/2 than it did on Windows 3.x. It was killed and the Windows 95 app came out something like 3 years later.
LoB
A Microserf wrote the HPFS filesystem too. Windows NT v3.1 and 4.0 apps ran faster on the HPFS filesystem than they did on HPFS. I found this out running the Watcom compiler on a dualboot system when doing a proof-of-concept port of an OS/2 app to NT 4.0. Now why didn't they support HPFS in NT? Could it be that it had SOMETHING to do with OS/2?
I wonder why they called the hpfs driver PINBALL.SYS????
Microsoft will do anything to keep it's monopoly. Look at how they spread the browser all over the OS and even into the installation process. Brilliant I say, brilliant. NOT.
I still think I have my 20-something Consensus UNIX floppies. That was a pain too but once installed on a 386, both OS/2 and UNIX did a nice job multi-tasking.
:)
Oh, how many nights I remember spent installing floppies...... Thanks for that memory. NOT.
get gtar and make a bootable floppy with it on it. put a backup hard disk in the system and just tar the entire OS/2 filesystem from / to your backup hard disk.
If you ever have a crash, just fix the failure and then boot from the floppy, format the hard hard disk if needed and extract the tar file to it. I loved the fact that OS/2 could be restored completely from tape and run. I used to do this about every two years just to make sure my filesystem wasn't too fragmented.
LoB
Good point. I really hoped that OpenDOC would have taken off too. I used HP's NewWave way back when and a data-centric system is the best. IMHO.
I see KDE is picking up some of this with KParts and I hope it really takes off. Just like Linux is far more stable as a component-based OS, applications will be far better when components do specific tasks. Think about it, why do we need a spell checker in every application? It's wasteful.
LoB
I had OS/2 machines running v2.1 with TCP/IP, X11, and Netware. We paid around $200 for the TCP/IP and PMX Server but on 10MB of memory it was a kick arse desktop compared to Dos/Windows.
Our UNIX guys couldn't believe a PC could do what OS/2 did. Heck, Texas Instruments had a multi-DSP design board that used OS/2's multi-tasking to debug in realtime the DSP board. Again, the techies were loven what OS/2 could do. The catch was that the department manager had a system we just could not get OS/2 installed on. I forget what it was but since he could not run it on his desktop it didn't make to onto more than a dozen systems.
It's still a pretty awesome OS. IMHO.
LoB
I think NextSTEP was in another league at the time. OS/2 was still very much a DESKTOP OS while the others were either workstation or server OS's.
I ran MicroPort UNIX on my 286 and Consensus UNIX System V on my 386 but X11 was a few years away still and the desktop hardware just wasn't quite powerfull enough at the time. Going from UNIX to OS/2 was a real pleasure. I had a very short time with DOS/Windows between UNIX and OS/2 with some NT beta's in there before running with OS/2.
You know Microsoft originally marketed NT as the replacement for DOS/Windows until they realized it was a bloated pig and moved the marketing to say it was a "workstation" OS. In 1991, Microsoft told me to wait for Chicago for the next great desktop OS from Microsoft.
I'm with you that the OS should be opensource. It's time.
LoB
WinG huh? It wasn't until IBM showed ID's Doom running in a window on OS/2 that Microsoft got off their ars and build WinG. IBM build DIVE with IDs help but something happened in the process and ID dropped out of the partnership. I think it had to do with culture clashes. Just a guess. From what I remember, there were huge groups of people around the OS/2, Doom-in-a-window demos at COMDEX.
Gesh, OS/2 v3.0 had OpenGL support builtin too, though it never got hardware OGL support.
There is very little, if anything, Microsoft ever did first in the computer industry. Most was just copied and they dominated by the anti-competitive leveraging of their monopoly. IMHO.
LoB
Not a monopoly in 1994? You are right that the courts didn't RULE they were one but they did sign a consent decree in 1994 with the DOJ. The Justice overseeing the case looked it over and refused to sign it because it didn't do enough to stop Microsofts strong-arming tactics. Judge Sporkin was removed from the case and Judge Jackson was handed the case and told to sign it. He did.
Judge Jackon is the same Judge Jackson who got the latest case and was he pissed to see what Microsoft did with the first decree.
Not a monopoly? With billions in cash there seems to be no law you are accountable to. Or so it seems.
Did you know that USAG Ashcroft received more money from Microsoft than from Enron?
LoB
Don't forget, in 1995 Microsoft did have a monopoly on PC OS's and what they did to make Windows 95 apps NOT run under OS/2 was anti-competitive and illegal. Microsoft built Windows 95 to load a few resources up at the 1GB memory address just to prevent OS/2 from running Windows 95 apps just like it ran Windows 3.x apps. You see, OS/2 could ONLY access 512MB of address space.
Let's not forget that in Nov 1994, at COMDEX, HP had 50% of their PC's running OS/2 the night before the show opened. Bill Gates made a phone call and by morning, NO HP computers were running OS/2.
The list goes on. I blame IBM 10% for OS/2 not gaining more market share and the other 90% was Microsofts anti-competitive nature to do ANYTHING to prevent the consumer from making the choice.
Speaking of choice, do you remember that Microsoft threatened to pull out of COMDEX because IBM was doing it's keynote speech about choices unless IBMs timeslot was moved to reduce the viewers. I think IBM dropped out of COMDEX the following year and all since.
Think about it. It took MIcrosoft 10 years to build a version of Windows that is close to OS/2 v2.0... well maybe v2.1 is a better comparison since it had better legacy Windows support and the 32bit graphics system updates. TEN YEARS!
WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY??? With Microsoft?
Nyet.
LoB