>Oh man, Perry ... don't even get me started on OS/2 and IBM's major marketing snafu!!

I think marketing was part of it. But it was just IBM being IBM that screwed it up. The first thing is too many hands in the kitchen, or something like that. This is the same problem that Apple had. They let managers that weren't part of projects, such as mainframe managers, have a say so in OS2. Managers were afraid that a new hot product would canabalize the product they were responsible for. So any new products were typically weakened in some way so they wouldn't impact existing products. IBM PC jr is a perfect example.

For some reason, I never liked IBM. I think cause I started working in the mainframe world, a couple years before pcs. It was obvious when Lotus came out how pcs could be a hugh advantage. It really hit home in the late 80s. I was a Computer Manager of a small company that was part of a hugh corporation. The part of the company I worked in was 40 people, so I was the computer department. Every once in a while I would meet a VP of IS from one of the bigger parts of the corporation. They were extremely biased against pcs.

The absolute stupidest arguement I've ever heard about anything was from one of the VPs who told me he was scared of using pcs for transaction processing. His argument was that if one of the smaller depts set up their own network with Book Subscription software, the cost to the company was not only the $20,000 cost for the network and pcs, but 10 million. That was the cost of the Subscription software on the mainframe. I tried to get him to understand that there were other costs involved too. Such as the 6 month wait to get anything done on the mainframe vs. 3 weeks to get it done on the pc. But got nowhere with him.

PF