Friday, July 15, 2005

OS/2 Finally buried

IBM finally announced the official, final death notice for OS/2.  Back before I joined Microsoft I was one of those who was attempting to jump on the OS/2 Warp bandwagon.  When I was in college I would read about it every week in PCWeek (now eWeek) and was impressed with its capabilities.  I even went so far as to purchase a copy.  $100 was a lot when Win3.1 came free on my Pentium 75.  Even after Win95 came out, I kept trying to run OS/2.  The problem I ran into with OS/2 (which is the same problem I ran into with Linux years later) was that, while the OS had lots of cool features and was, on paper at least, better than Win95, there just wasn't much software for it that could compete with the software for Windows.  Having a shiny new OS with nothing to run on it is like buying a new car but not having a drivers license.  It looks really cool but just isn't that much fun to use.  Now, a decade or so later, it's finally being officially put out to pasture. 

1 comment:

  1. a better analogy would be a new car, but not many roads to drive on.


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