At a conference held recently in London and hosted by P&P Corporate Systems, 750 UK executives turned up to hear what Microsoft Corp’s Bill Gates had to say about computer rightsizing vis-a-vis what Tony Stefanis had to say as Personal Systems director with IBM Corp. The audience was expecting a lively clash of views and the event was expertly chaired by professor Heinz Wolff. However, IBM’s presentation was totally outclassed by Gates’ confident and reasonable exposition of the future of the desktop – Stefanis chose to ignore any reference to the rift between his company and Microsoft and hardly gave a nod in the direction of user confusion over OS/2 versus Windows. Instead he elected to explain how IBM’s Personal Systems division is organised – a subject of endless fascination for IBMers and the odd behavioural psychologist in the audience but of little value to anyone else. For those that may feel they missed something, the division is organised into advanced systems – file and input-output servers, multimedia systems and portable systems. OS/2 is the foundation of the IBM desktop strategy as this foundation couldn’t be a derivative of the stand-alone PC environment. The buzz phrases were multimedia and object-oriented and Stefanis explained that IBM would provide tools to exploit these technologies across a variety of systems. There will be binary compatibility between OS/2 and the intuitive object-oriented desktop environment. The industry may be surprised to hear that IBM is working with Microsoft in the development of operating system technologies, including NT, which can be incorporated into our OS/2 plans, but that is what the man said. Industry watchers might also be puzzled by what appears to be IBM’s new marketing slogan for OS/2 – Open Systems 2day. By contrast Gates’ presentation was pithy and had more of a sense of vision – computers should be challenging to use in the same way that a well-made automobile is challenging to drive – the surprise is not in the ‘oops’ but in the ‘aaah’. Windows 3.0 is the foundation for Microsoft’s next step and it is a commercially firm foundation – 5m copies of Windows had been sold by the end of August. Furthermore, Gates reminded people that although IBM has dominant market share for personal computers, that share is only around 19%, and other manufacturers have committed to shipping Windows with their systems. Windows 3.1 will be released in four or five months with NT Executive to follow later next year. Indeed, Gates seemed to be hinting that OS/2 was becoming as alien an operating system to Microsoft as, say, VAX/VMS. There will be no compatibility between Windows and Presentation Manager as chasing another operating system going in the opposite direction is impossible.
OS/400 on the desktop
On one slide the audience was given the impression that the NT kernel would support only MS-DOS, 16-bit and 32-bit Windows directly, which would seem to suggest that OS/2 will be supported as another subsystem such as Unix via Posix. The most telling point that Gates made was simply to show a slide illustrating the number of different operating systems IBM is now saying it will support on the desktop: MS-DOS, OS/2, Apple Mac, Pink, NeXT, Go and AIX – some in Rochester are also talking of putting the OS/400 down there too. Whereas Microsoft is saying it will have a scalable operating system from Windows 3.1 to Windows NT, so that the one basic operating system will span systems from the personal organiser through the notebook, the pen, the home, the multimedia and the office desktop system to the RISC server. In the short term this seems like a clear marketing advantage if a technically difficult feat to pull off. But then, Gates is winning points with Microsoft’s evolving object-oriented strategy focused on its OLE – object linking and embedding – technology, which is, he says, not a case of having no object-orientation and overnight the system changes. Although, to be fair, while the Microsoft approach to object-oriented technology may be more credible in the sh
ort term, it is a far less ambitious project than that upon which IBM appears to be embarking and the stakes are, consequently, far lower. At present, Gates seems to have the advantage – the faster he can grow that Windows user base, the smaller the market for IBM’s all-embracing object-oriented environment, which seems likely to replace OS/2.
