Rash's Judgment: IBM Tries to Close the Door on Windows
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
One of the reasons we find Comdex so interesting every year is
the technology. We can see what the manufacturers have in store
for us over the next year, and we can get some idea how changes
in the industry will affect us. Another feature of Comdex are the
alliances that form, and the resulting realignment in industry
relationships. These changes in industry relationships can affect
us as greatly as changes in technology, because they affect the
manner in which the technology is made available.
 
One of these realignments took place at Comdex last week, when
IBM summoned Microsoft to a joint press conference in which the
companies announced their plans for Microsoft Windows and
Presentation Manager. Briefly, the agreement that IBM and
Microsoft announced said that future developments for a graphical
user interface would take place first for Presentation Manager,
and only later for Windows. Microsoft also announced that a
number of Presentation Manager features scheduled for inclusion
into Windows would not take place. In other words, if you had
been waiting for 32-bit expanded memory access, or for the
availability of multiple threading, you're going to wait forever.
They won't ever be part of Windows.
 
What does this mean to you? Possibly nothing, and possibly
everything. Until now, there had been promises by Microsoft to
design additional capability into DOS and DOS extenders. These
promises, had they been kept, would ensure a future for machines
that had less memory than was required for Presentation Manager.
These machines are still useful, and still serve their users
perfectly well. They are not, however, the latest thing. Worse,
their presence and the presence of an extended DOS threatened the
future of OS/2.
 
IBM has a considerable investment in the success of OS/2, and the
idea of Microsoft pitching software that could make OS/2
unnecessary was more than IBM could stand. It would appear that
the company insisted that Microsoft kill off Windows. While there
is never any way to know for sure what IBM told Microsoft before
the press conference, industry observers say that Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates would never have abandoned improvements to
Windows without coercion from IBM. The reason is simple: The
company would never have given up control of the development of
MS-DOS if it hadn't had to.
 
IBM, for its part, clearly wants Windows to die. IBM's Jim
Cannavino later appeared at a joint press conference put on by
two companies that do not support Windows, WordPerfect and Lotus,
and publicly supported their new user interface, and their
decision not to support Windows. During the press conference,
Cannavino joined his counterparts at the other two companies in
chiding Microsoft for its inability to produce top-quality
Presentation Manager software.
 
Clearly, IBM has decided that Windows is better off gone, and
that users should spend more money on machines that meet IBM's
vision for the future. Do you share IBM's vision? If not, you
might start looking for alternatives to the Windows IBM doesn't
want you to have.
 
                              --- Wayne Rash
 
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