From: brian@jaguar.cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill)
Subject: Re: New product: Which One? OS/2 or NT? 
Followup-To: comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy
Organization: University of Utah Computer Science
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 93 09:44:15 GMT

  > From:  jmh@coyote.datalog.com (John Hughes)
  > Subject:  New product: Which One? OS/2 or NT?

  > We are in the final development stages for a commercial product intended
  > for use as a management automation tool in production environments. Similar
  > in effect, but quite different in implementation, with MRP II. It's a
  > distributed processing system which will handle inventory, purchasing,
  > accounting, sales, and production planning (there's more, but those are
  > the high points). It's now time to make a primary platform decision.
  > 
  > Any suggestions? OS/2 is nice, but what advantages might NT offer that
  > OS/2 can't? How about responsiveness from both IBM and Microsoft? I'm
  > just now delving into OS/2, and so far I like what I'm seeing. But I've
  > heard both pros and cons about IBM's developer support. I'd like to
  > hear about your experiences.
  > |    John M. Hughes      P.O. Box 43305      Tucson   AZ     85733     USA 

I'm sorry I did not respond to this sooner, but I was in the middle of
putting out what is probably my final beta when you posted and I knew
that it would be a bit time consuming to answer this message.
I included a couple of extra groups as they are relevant, but I directed
followups to the two advocacy groups only as sometimes these discussions
get out of hand.  (I'm hoping some of the MS people in c.o.m.p.win32
will answer the DCE question).

I too make a product, but it is rather different from yours, so let me begin
with some background info.

I work for a research group that is a state center of excellence,
meaning in our case, that we take software developed within the
group and eventually pass over into the commercial world.  Associated
with our group is a spinoff company.  I am a member of the board
and "chief technical officer" of this company, though we're very
small so those title are somewhat of a joke.  One of the interests
within the group was the ability to do cross-platform development
and we decided through a very complicate process I won't bore you
with that our first major product will be a near-POSIX compliant
set of utilities and libraries.  We are about ready to ship the
OS/2 version and expect the NT version to be ready before NT ships.
(We're assuming NT will ship in May/June.)

WHICH PLATFORM IS TECHNICALLY BETTER?
This one's easy, NT wins hands down.

OS/2 does have one feature that NT doesn't that you might need... REXX.
If you need an imbedded scripting language, then REXX fills that
niche rather well, NT will eventually have ObjectBasic to fill this
need, but it's not there yet.

Otherwise NT has a lot to offer that OS/2 doesn't.  It has a much
more modern design and nice modern features like memory mapped
files, asynchronous I/O, etc (see Helen Custers, Inside Windows NT
if you want to know more about that).  It supports symmetric
multiprocessing (for example Sequent was announcing a model in this
week's PC Week).  It's already running on 2 RISC architectures
(MIPS and Alpha).

NT has local security (not yet certified) at the C2 level and the hooks
are there for the B2 level.

NT has a nicer filesystem called NTFS.  This file system works with
the security system to enforce ownership.  It has a very fast CHKDSK's.
Access control lists. The standard package supports UPS's and RAID 0.
(You can get these for OS/2 servers, but you pay extra.)

NTs base package comes with TCP/IP and peer-to-peer file and printer sharing.
These are much better integrated than OS/2's add-on packages.
For example you can "dup" (i.e. duplicate) TCP/IP sockets under NT, but
not under OS/2.  OS/2 has peer-to-peer only if you're running their
servers, though PC week has said that IBM is working on this for OS/2.

Remote procedure calls may be important to you.
NT has RPC built-in to the OS, where OS/2 treats it as an add-on.
NT's RPC can use DCE as a transport, but
one caveat: IBM plans to ship DCE for OS/2 this year.  It is clear
that IBM is _fully_ committed to _full_ DCE compliance.
Recently there have been questions raised to how full an implementation
of DCE will be available under NT.  Unfortunately I don't know for certain.
Hopefully someone from Microsoft will see this and fill us in.

If internationalization is important to you, NT has fully integrated
UNICODE into NT.  NTFS and all Win32 API calls by default use UNICODE
(ANSI wrappers for these calls are provided).

One important feature of NT is that if you need to support Windows 3.X
clients you don't need to support another API... ports between Win32 and
Windows 3.X are trivial, or you can have the Windows 3.1 clients use
the Win32s DLL's and then literally run the same binaries on NT
and Windows 3.1.  The next major upgrade to Windows 3.X is code-named
Chicago it will use the Win32 API, so if you're on NT, then you're all
set.

Stability is another important issue.  OS/2 2.0 GA is not very stable.
In fact NT's first beta in many ways rivals OS/2's stability.
I very much expect that the shipping version of NT will be far more
stable than OS/2 GA.  IBM released a service pack for OS/2 2.0, but
unfortunately it too has stability problems.  I am told that OS/2 2.1,
which should release sometime in Febuary/March, is becoming more stable
though.


WHO GIVES BETTER SUPPORT?
I'm going to divide this issue into two parts:
	Support While You're Making the Product.
	Support When Marketing the Product.

Support While You're Making the Product.
Several months ago, Microsoft was way ahead, but IBM has caught up.

They have very different philosophies about how they do it.

IBM holds your hand.  Unfortunately you'll need it.  Their documentation
and tools have real problems.  They are however very responsive to your
needs... they try hard... sometimes you want to scream "quit trying, and
do!!!".

Microsoft tries to figure out what will need in advance, and then
gathers it all together and give it to you.  NT is already better
documented than OS/2 (remember that NT is only in the middle of
it's beta cycle).  Microsoft seems to guess really well what you
need.  They are not as responsive as IBM when you do hit a problem,
though. (This does not mean they don't help you, it's just that
they are not always as fast about it.) They sometimes don't answer
questions that are posted on CompuServe (I've never had it happen
personally, but have seen several such case go by in
comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32).  They suffer from the "Cocky
Kid" syndrome.

In general I prefer the Microsoft approach... rarely do I not find what
I needed, but this is largely a personal preference, the two are largely
equal.  Note that this is a recent development in IBM -- when I started
developing for OS/2 in February of last year, their support was a nightmare.

Support When Marketing the Product.

Microsoft really shines here, they send you appropriate forms to fill out
to be included in their product lists.  They are currently gathering such
information using a little Visual Basic program that collect the info, then
you can e-mail it in.  They are even making up specialized
lists. Their catalog of NT products (you can get both the NT and OS/2
product catalogs from the ftp site below) includes paragraph sized
descriptions of the products.

IBM's similar such efforts are pitiful.  I'm still upset with IBM for messing
up our entry.  Rather than asking us what we wanted in there, they "guessed"
and ended up listing the University phone number and name instead of
our company's!  Their list, despite being desperate for ISVs, is mearly
a three column text file consisting of Company Name, Product, and Phone.

----------
Sometime ago I made a list comparing NT and OS/2 2.0, you can find the
list in pub/info at the ftp site below.

Before making your decision I strongly suggest you get the NT CD-ROM
(see my .signature below -- (people ask me for the number alot)) and OS/2,
WorkSet/2, and the documents for both.  Use both to make trivial programs
(perhaps proto-types of you own products). The first thing you'll find is that
IBM is slower about getting you what you need!  After using both, I'll be
rather surprised if you pick OS/2 over NT.

Feel free to e-mail me if you have questions.

Brian
-- 
C. Brian Sturgill                  Windows, WfW, Windows NT and some OS/2 2.0
University of Utah                 information available via anonymous ftp to
Center for Software Science        easy.cs.utah.edu. Also all my Tidbits posts.
brian@cs.utah.edu; CIS: 70363,1373     Windows NT SDK: $69; (800) 227-4679