On 2007-12-09, Rex Ballard <rex.ballard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The big problem with OS/2 was that it was developed in the days when
> John Akers was saying "If we Build it, they will come", or more
> accurately, "If we Build it, they will buy". It was the worst kind of
> hubris. In late 1991, MVS 4.0 was released and the anticipated orders
Indeed. Fundamentally, IBM did not understand the retail software
distribution channel. Where and how a product is displayed in stores is
largely determined by the vendor of that product. It's called "in-store
advertising". If you want the store to put up posters promoting your
product, or put your product in nice end cap displays, then you have to
buy in-store advertising.
The situation is similar if you want your product to show up in the
store's ads in the Sunday paper.
(This is why the blurb describing a given product is often the same in
all the ads from different stores, and in different mail-order catelogs.
The vendor wrote the blurb, and paid the store to run it in the catelog
and ads. That's also what determines who much catalog space a product
gets--how much the vendor wanted to buy).
Since IBM didn't bother with this, because of the attitude Rex describes
above, OS/2 ended up in the bottom row of the darkest, dirtiest shelf in
the most inaccessible part of the store, where it was rarely, if ever,
promoted in the store's ads.
So, it is no surprise sales were low.
But there was another problem: IBM's treatment of developers. Other
companies, when promoting a new OS, provide some advertising money to
major developers, so that those developers will be able to get the apps
on the good spots in the store, buy end caps, get in the Sunday ads, and
so on. When you are pushing a new OS, you need to help out the early
developers, to bootstrap the market. You need apps to sell the OS, and
the early developers need money to sell apps.
Even more shocking is an incident reported by Jerry Pournelle (I'm about
90% sure I'm remembering who it was right, but it may have been some
other prominent columnist). He was at a show (Comdex, I think). He
went to the IBM both and said he was interested in developing for OS/2,
and wanted to know how to get started. They gave him a long application
to fill out. After that was reviewed, if he were approved, he would be
allowed to spend several hundred dollars getting the SDK and
documentation.
He then went to the Micorosft booth, and asked a similar question about
the upcoming Windows 95. They handed him the SDK and documentation.
I bet that by the end of that Comdex, Windows 95 (which hadn't even been
released yet, I believe) had more third-party application developers
working on it than OS/2 had. That was when I knew that OS/2 was not
going to win.
(It should have won. It had all the technical advantages of Windows 95
as far as 32-bit support went, and much more, with none of the
disadvantages. It had amazing support for Win 3.x applications and DOS
applications, making it a much easier system for people leaving those
systems. But with IBM ignoring it--or worse, many high up people there
were actively against it, it never had a chance).
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