From: yiupun@leland.Stanford.EDU (Yiupun Michael Kwong)
Subject: Re: NT? WHY?
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 21:24:08 GMT

In article <1992Oct1.161129.2524@solaris.rz.tu-clausthal.de> ch@sg1502.chemie.uni-marburg.de (Christoph H. Hochstaetter) writes:
>In article <92274.152722BJT105@psuvm.psu.edu>, BJT105@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
>|> I think there are a couple important reasons people shouldn't "throw their
>|> support" exclusively to NT or OS/2:
>|> 
>|> 1. They need each other.  Both OS/2 and NT will get better.  The competition
>|>    between them will drive both systems to higher and higher levels of
>|>    features and quality.  It is obvious that NT's feature list was driven
>|>    by OS/2 ... MS will make sure that NT has everything OS/2 has, and more.
>|>    And IBM is looking at NT as the baseline for OS/2 3.0.  Although we all
>|>    hate dealing with two platforms, it would be a tragedy for innovation
>|>    if either NT or OS/2 died.
>
>I totally disagree. If both OS will survive, the compatibility will be DOS
>and 16-bit Windows, maybe with this really ugly DPMI 32-bit. So developers
>will decide to write DOS and WIN16 apps to have the compatibility with
>both OS. That's not what we all desire. I greatly prefer /NT over OS/2,
>but the worst thing that could ever happen, is that both OS will survive.
>
>Later in a year or so, when either OS/2 or /NT died, there should be some
>OS compatible with the survived OS to start competition again. But please
>not two OS, which are incompatible on the 32-bit level.

I disagree totally.  The assumption that developers will only develop for the
greatest common denominator.  There are a lot of developers out there who
developed for the Macs long before Windows gained a firm foothold in the PC
arena.  In fact, there are significant number of Windows programs which first
appeared as a Mac program.  The difference between developing Mac programs
and writing DOS programs, is greater than that between writing an NT program
and an OS/2 program, since Mac at the time presented an entirely new paradigm
of programming (GUI, the event loop) to commercial software developer, whereas
both OS/2 and NT are based on multithreading principles, both have a GUI
(even the GUI is significantly different, these are not quite two entirely
different paradigms altogether), both are 32-bit ...

As a couple of people have said before, since there are true advantages of
native OS/2, NT applications over DOS/16-bit Windows programs (else there
is really no reason to switch to OS/2 or NT in the first place).  Unless
all software developers conspire not to develop 32-bit apps, there are
definitely going to be someone who will be willing to take advantage of the
opportunity of producing better softwares.  And due to competition, other
software developers are likely to follow suit.  I really don't believe
the PC world is now so narrow that there can only be one standard around.
A lot of Mac software developers survived on working after the 10% of the
PC market occupied by Macintoshes.  If OS/2 and NT both command 20% or even
more of the computer market, there is no reason why they cannot coexist.
It will be a much more compicated world, but also a more interesting and
challenging one.

>
>Christoph
>-- 
>Internet: ch@sg1502.chemie.uni-marburg.de
>BITNET: HAMPE2@DMRHRZ11
>Fido: 2:243/660


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