osOpinion: The New OS/2: Warp 4 ‘Convenience Packs’

[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]

“Reason dictates that the OS/2 Warp platform, with its
year-after-year cycle of free updates and constant performance
enhancements (as well as the no-regression policy), qualifies as
the better-supported platform. Now a new form of update is being
provided by IBM, although not a free, giveaway version. IBM’s new
approach is called “Convenience Packs….”

“Microsoft has a dopey little saying in on their Office2000 ads,
“What Productivity Means Today”. However, they want you to forget
about the zero-productivity part of the typical Windows routine:
downtime, crashes, system reloads from scratch, version and file
compatibility problems, and worse. Fortunately, IBM has a better
idea. IBM believes that real productivity results from having a
stable, reliable platform with no sudden changes, and certainly no
need to format hard drives and start over again. IBM values
customer data, whereas Microsoft does not. To IBM, data means
business. To Microsoft, data is an annoyance that is better off
just being ignored.”

“Since IBM puts the safety of your data and the complexity of
your carefully-tuned, personally-optimized desktop environment as
its first priority, any new version of OS/2 will necessarily
involve a set of incremental adjustments to the base OS/2 platform,
not a full-blown product redesign. Since OS/2 is already designed
with a more futuristic, technologically superior architecture than
Windows, it is only natural that IBM would “not try to fix what is
not broken”. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the
Convenience Packs will do exactly what the name implies: add
convenience to the installation and update process.”

Complete
Story