



  It's  Barefisted  Mayhem!                               The OS Wars

  Stephen Manes in his recent New York Times review of the newest IBM
  OS/2 offering was not very charitable in his assessment of WARP. One
  got the sense that the man was really offended by a piece of software
  sent out for evaluation and review that crippled his config.sys and
  rejected standard "off the shelf" hardware.  All of the earlier OS/2
  ills Manes replayed like a flashback from a very bad film. As a
  matter of record, the planned release date of Warp was pushed back
  to early November to recall and repair the damage.  Almost no comment
  from Big Blue. A number of weeks later OS/2 users were still standing
  on one foot...waiting for the final.

  I asked around to get a sense of early WARP experiences and was quite
  astounded by what I learned.  The non-OS/2 users said they had fits
  with slow installs, groaning hardware and system failures while the
  regular OS/2 users said they had few problems installing and then
  using WARP.  Is it possible that non-OS/2 users were missing crucial
  operating system requirements which caused this havoc while
  experienced OS/2 users understood the nuances and therefore had
  success?  Or perhaps we are discussing operating system partisanship
  of an extreme where everyone is lying.

  The contrasts between public success and failure cannot be ignored
  amid this rotten egg tossing. One assumes that all the diddling with
  IBM's Windows specific OS/2 add-on, coupled with corporate
  statements of easy use, speaks to the economic reality of attracting
  Windows users prior to the competing 32 bit WINDOW95 release sometime
  next year. Charges of lies, libel and other low life behavior, while
  very funny and at times outrageous, are really an incredible phenomena.
  We had to share some of the debate resulting from the WARP offering
  while lurking in the darker corners of the net. We requested permission
  to reprint expecting silence...which is what we got. It's too good to
  bury on a Sysop's hard drive which is why we throw caution and prudence
  to the Gods!

  As an aside there are two issues this donnybrook has put to rest. The
  first is that the silent horde of users will take it all in and
  ultimately draw their own conclusions using other criteria. The second
  is that off-line readers do not necessarily help temper the words of
  users determined to continue the operating system wars.  The various
  last entry on the TOC should really give you a case of the giggles!  LBL



