5 ms·

Windows was selling well while OS/2 sales were, to quote Gates, "dismal", and Microsoft couldn't afford to support a failing project. (IBM may have had more pro

by scholia 11y ago

Windows was selling well while OS/2 sales were, to quote Gates, "dismal", and Microsoft couldn't afford to support a failing project. (IBM may have had more programmers on OS/2 than Microsoft had programmers.) Thanks to hiring Dave Cutler and staff from DEC, Microsoft could see a way out. However, IBM rejected the plan to move to NT as OS/2 3.0, and the two companies formally divorced. After that, IBM did its best to kill Microsoft. (One IBM senior manager told me: "We're going to burn Bill's butt.") Bear in mind that in 1990, when Windows 3 came out, IBM had an annual turnover of $69 billion and Microsoft's turnover was $0.8 billion. It was a giant monopolist against a tiny start-up. So, given the context, what was underhand about Microsoft's behavior, and what should it have done? How did IBM's 1991 development of Workplace OS for PowerPC -- intended to cut both Microsoft and Intel out of the PC market -- fit into the strategy?

yuhong 11y ago
I am also talking about a few years later, up to the "Chicago"/Win95 period when the attacks really got nasty.
- scholia 11y ago
  A period when IBM was spending more than $1 billion a year on OS/2 and WorkPlace OS to try to kill Microsoft? A period when IBM formed an alliance with Apple and Motorola to create a PC Reference Platform to try to kill both Microsoft and Intel? Up to the point in 1995 where IBM spent $3.5 billion on Lotus and used SmartSuite bundling to try to kill Microsoft Office? Microsoft's turnover had grown to $5.3 billion in 1995, but IBM's turnover was $72 billion, and it was still a brutal monopolist targeting a much smaller company.
  - hga 11y ago
    Indeed, people like me were cheering Microsoft back in that period. I started programming in 1978, on IBM systems, and they were indeed "a brutal monopolist", probably feared more than Microsoft has ever been. Sure, during the early-mid '90s Microsoft had sharp elbows and was looking out for its own interests, but those also just happened to coincide with ours. IBM was big, stupid and much more dangerous, UNIX(TM) was horribly fragmented (one of the core competencies I developed in the early '80s was porting software between different versions of it, and see The Unix Haters Handbook publishing in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook (disclaimer, Simson is a friend)). GNU/the FSF was doing worthwhile stuff, but was and still is hanging fire on a kernel, the BSD porting efforts had been crippled by the '92-3 AT&T lawsuit, Linux was started from scratch in 1991 and immature, while NT was developed by well funded top notch experienced people (at least back then it was very rare if not unheard of for someone to develop more than one operating system, the process was so onerous) and was a great hope for a lot of us. In the mid '90s I developed or took part in developing several very solid systems using it, and I believe it's TCO and maintainability exceeded UNIX(TM) during that period. Unfortunately, Microsoft started fumbling the ball about 3-4 years after NT's release (on or after the first Service Pack of NT 3.5 or more likely 3.51 as I recall), NT 4 was conceptually hopeless by moving graphics into the kernel, "and the rest is history".
    - scholia 11y ago
      Good points. Microsoft, of course, had a major problem, which was how to get the market to move from DOS-based Windows to NT. Not even offering OEMs 75% off the price of NT managed to shift them. Ultimately, Microsoft had to do whatever it took, and not all of it was nice. It didn't manage to do it until XP in 2001. Re Unix, you have missed out the COSE/Hamilton group development of OSF/1, first released in 1991. This was supposed to unify most of the major players -- DEC, HP, IBM etc -- except Sun* behind a single Unix to prevent Microsoft from getting into corporate computing with NT. Presumably you would have come across it.... * OSF = "Oppose Sun Forever" according to Scott McNealy
      - hga 11y ago
        "Oppose Sun Forever", heh. Yes, indeed, I used it in 1996-7 on the Alpha, just after it was renamed Digital Unix from DEC OSF/1 AXP. It was very nice, ran everything we wanted well, plus had a great High Availability capability. But I didn't view it as a major contender, back then at least, Sun provided the systems of choice. Assuming you could manage to buy them. As for Win 16 -> Win 98 -> XP ... I don't know, I went from Windows 3.1 to NT, and as far as I could tell NT was better and more stable than the legacy non-memory protected stuff; hmmm, but I'll bet not for games (and NT4 putting graphics in the kernel was ugly). XP was great, and due to things mentioned elsewhere, I and then my parents used it for more than a decade.
        scholia 11y ago
        Yes, NT was much more stable than Windows 95/98/98SE, and technically superior. Unfortunately it wouldn't run quite a lot of Windows programs, and one of them was whatever we used for AOL access, which was quite important at the time. I dual-booted the two types of Windows way back then, and it was just too hard to stay on the NT side.... To some extent (possibly a large extent), OSF/1 was a push against the AT&T/Sun effort to unify Unix with SVR4. It just ended up more fractured than ever, which was a shame. There was a brief window when Unix could perhaps have been more successful. That was between DOS and the Windows vs OS/2 war, when Microsoft Xenix was relatively successful. However, IBM was dead against Unix at the time, and OS/2 EE was meant to be the IBM-owned cornerstone of its Systems Application Architecture. Unix could run on everything from PCs to Amdahl mainframes and supercomputers, whereas IBM had two major mainframe operating systems, at least five on minicomputers, plus workstations and desktops. No wonder IBM saw Unix as a massive threat to its account control.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    If MS went with "NT OS/2" I doubt "OS/2 for PowerPC" would exist, which was a stripped down version of the "Workplace OS" you mentioned BTW. Interestingly, Windows NT themselves was ported to PowerPC too, and it was one of the main focus for NT 3.51 back in 1995.
    - scholia 11y ago
      Well, Microsoft did go with "NT OS/2" -- it just quickly replaced intended OS/2 compatablility with Windows compatibility. Otherwise, IBM claimed Workplace OS was new code. NT, of course, wasn't written for x86 in the first place. It was intended to be cross-platform. It was also sold on PCs with DEC Alpha chips.
      - yuhong 11y ago
        Of course, the problems with this plan wasn't the WinNT part, it was the Win95/Chicago part. My favorite technical problem is how it's dependence on DOS led Caldera to continue their DR-DOS lawsuit. But it wasn't just the technical problems, there was also the tactics MS used to attack OS/2 2.x and later.
        scholia 11y ago
        Win95 was cheap, easy to install (no reformat needed), had masses of software support, and sold well. Microsoft would have preferred to sell NT but the market voted with its wallet. (By the way, Win95 mainly used DOS as a loader.) Otherwise, which tactics were unacceptable in the context of a small company being attacked by a giant monopolist that wanted to drive it out of business?
        yuhong 11y ago
        I am comparing it with OS/2 2.x not NT.
        scholia 11y ago

by scholia 11y ago

yuhong 11y ago

I am also talking about a few years later, up to the "Chicago"/Win95 period when the attacks really got nasty.

scholia 11y ago
A period when IBM was spending more than $1 billion a year on OS/2 and WorkPlace OS to try to kill Microsoft? A period when IBM formed an alliance with Apple and Motorola to create a PC Reference Platform to try to kill both Microsoft and Intel? Up to the point in 1995 where IBM spent $3.5 billion on Lotus and used SmartSuite bundling to try to kill Microsoft Office? Microsoft's turnover had grown to $5.3 billion in 1995, but IBM's turnover was $72 billion, and it was still a brutal monopolist targeting a much smaller company.
- hga 11y ago
  Indeed, people like me were cheering Microsoft back in that period. I started programming in 1978, on IBM systems, and they were indeed "a brutal monopolist", probably feared more than Microsoft has ever been. Sure, during the early-mid '90s Microsoft had sharp elbows and was looking out for its own interests, but those also just happened to coincide with ours. IBM was big, stupid and much more dangerous, UNIX(TM) was horribly fragmented (one of the core competencies I developed in the early '80s was porting software between different versions of it, and see The Unix Haters Handbook publishing in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook (disclaimer, Simson is a friend)). GNU/the FSF was doing worthwhile stuff, but was and still is hanging fire on a kernel, the BSD porting efforts had been crippled by the '92-3 AT&T lawsuit, Linux was started from scratch in 1991 and immature, while NT was developed by well funded top notch experienced people (at least back then it was very rare if not unheard of for someone to develop more than one operating system, the process was so onerous) and was a great hope for a lot of us. In the mid '90s I developed or took part in developing several very solid systems using it, and I believe it's TCO and maintainability exceeded UNIX(TM) during that period. Unfortunately, Microsoft started fumbling the ball about 3-4 years after NT's release (on or after the first Service Pack of NT 3.5 or more likely 3.51 as I recall), NT 4 was conceptually hopeless by moving graphics into the kernel, "and the rest is history".
  - scholia 11y ago
    Good points. Microsoft, of course, had a major problem, which was how to get the market to move from DOS-based Windows to NT. Not even offering OEMs 75% off the price of NT managed to shift them. Ultimately, Microsoft had to do whatever it took, and not all of it was nice. It didn't manage to do it until XP in 2001. Re Unix, you have missed out the COSE/Hamilton group development of OSF/1, first released in 1991. This was supposed to unify most of the major players -- DEC, HP, IBM etc -- except Sun* behind a single Unix to prevent Microsoft from getting into corporate computing with NT. Presumably you would have come across it.... * OSF = "Oppose Sun Forever" according to Scott McNealy
    - hga 11y ago
      "Oppose Sun Forever", heh. Yes, indeed, I used it in 1996-7 on the Alpha, just after it was renamed Digital Unix from DEC OSF/1 AXP. It was very nice, ran everything we wanted well, plus had a great High Availability capability. But I didn't view it as a major contender, back then at least, Sun provided the systems of choice. Assuming you could manage to buy them. As for Win 16 -> Win 98 -> XP ... I don't know, I went from Windows 3.1 to NT, and as far as I could tell NT was better and more stable than the legacy non-memory protected stuff; hmmm, but I'll bet not for games (and NT4 putting graphics in the kernel was ugly). XP was great, and due to things mentioned elsewhere, I and then my parents used it for more than a decade.
      - scholia 11y ago
        Yes, NT was much more stable than Windows 95/98/98SE, and technically superior. Unfortunately it wouldn't run quite a lot of Windows programs, and one of them was whatever we used for AOL access, which was quite important at the time. I dual-booted the two types of Windows way back then, and it was just too hard to stay on the NT side.... To some extent (possibly a large extent), OSF/1 was a push against the AT&T/Sun effort to unify Unix with SVR4. It just ended up more fractured than ever, which was a shame. There was a brief window when Unix could perhaps have been more successful. That was between DOS and the Windows vs OS/2 war, when Microsoft Xenix was relatively successful. However, IBM was dead against Unix at the time, and OS/2 EE was meant to be the IBM-owned cornerstone of its Systems Application Architecture. Unix could run on everything from PCs to Amdahl mainframes and supercomputers, whereas IBM had two major mainframe operating systems, at least five on minicomputers, plus workstations and desktops. No wonder IBM saw Unix as a massive threat to its account control.
- yuhong 11y ago
  If MS went with "NT OS/2" I doubt "OS/2 for PowerPC" would exist, which was a stripped down version of the "Workplace OS" you mentioned BTW. Interestingly, Windows NT themselves was ported to PowerPC too, and it was one of the main focus for NT 3.51 back in 1995.
  - scholia 11y ago
    Well, Microsoft did go with "NT OS/2" -- it just quickly replaced intended OS/2 compatablility with Windows compatibility. Otherwise, IBM claimed Workplace OS was new code. NT, of course, wasn't written for x86 in the first place. It was intended to be cross-platform. It was also sold on PCs with DEC Alpha chips.
    - yuhong 11y ago
      Of course, the problems with this plan wasn't the WinNT part, it was the Win95/Chicago part. My favorite technical problem is how it's dependence on DOS led Caldera to continue their DR-DOS lawsuit. But it wasn't just the technical problems, there was also the tactics MS used to attack OS/2 2.x and later.
      - scholia 11y ago
        Win95 was cheap, easy to install (no reformat needed), had masses of software support, and sold well. Microsoft would have preferred to sell NT but the market voted with its wallet. (By the way, Win95 mainly used DOS as a loader.) Otherwise, which tactics were unacceptable in the context of a small company being attacked by a giant monopolist that wanted to drive it out of business?
        yuhong 11y ago
        I am comparing it with OS/2 2.x not NT.
        scholia 11y ago