🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3329D9CF.59E2B600@visix.com>, david@visix.com says...
>
>The real problem is that a lot of the office-suite-using community
>wants MS Word, and they won't be happy with ANYTHING else, no matter
>how good it might be.  And Microsoft is more than happy to refuse to
>give it to them.  There is no way anybody can break that kind of a
>market stranglehold.  And nobody should be trying to.

It's not that people wanted word, but that clients insist that docs,
spreadsheets, data bases, etc be prepared in standard formats.  Having
isolated stand alone formats or even an integrated os2 suite that
can't generate output in readily convertible formats is not & has never 
been an option.

When IBM bought Lotus, many of us thought a major cross-platform suite
for os2 was finally about to become a reality. I would not have had
much difficulty persuading my main clients to install a Lotus suite if
there'd been one available.  It's what now, 2 years or nearly
so, there's still no product, at least not a complete one.  No surprise
that so many have been forced to let go os2. IBM should have firmly kicked 
Lotus' ass way back when Warp 3 had momentum but blew the opportunity badly.

Oddly & ironically enough, MS has won the war more by default than
by design.  In many respects, Win95 is sloppy mediocre crap, NT is questionable &
MS Office 97 is a bloated hog that cripples damn near anything less than a
200 Mz / 64 MB ram machine, but the Wintel consortium rolls on thanks to great
marketing hype & fewer strategic blunders than IBM. 

Complaining that os2 users want software for free is a bogus argument.  
There's never been much heavy duty product to spend hard currency on.  
Win3.1 succeeded because the core business apps were ready to roll at
the time it was released.  

-bb