Realistic Expectations

[London Geezer]

I thought it was common knowledge that MS has made and makes its shitload of money from their CRIMINAL licensing system, whereby an office with 50 PC will have to buy 50 licences at whatever ridiculous price to run MS programs (Windows and Office mainly), which they are pretty much forced to, in most cases.

 

[YeuEmMaiMai]

when OS/2 came out there was ZERO DOS support and that is what killed it. By the time they added it NT had already ensured it would never get a foothold in the corporate market.

You can make NT based windows fairly secure by doing the following

a. remove floppy drive
b. enforcing security on the machine like disable the guest account, messenger service, etc....
c. forcing IE to use a firewall and restrict access to certain sites based upon content
d. installing Anti Virus and Anti Spyware software

and most importantly restrict the user accounts to a level where they cannot make unwanted changes to the PC or install programs.

What about IBM?
The little time of what Ihad tried OS/2, I remember it was quite nice.

Haven't followed their software much since then, do they still have an OS? What (if any) (consumer) software does IBM have?

OS2 had a HUGE advertising campaign, and still it went nowhere.
IBM is co-developing the software for Cell, but it's still early, nt much is known at the moment.

 

[MrWibble]

FYI. Commodore Computers went bankrupt.

I'm aware of that. But it was another time, another world. Things have changed so much since that time, it would be foolish to assume an entertainment oriented PC would fail just because Amiga failed over 10 years ago.

Yeah, if it were just that. But the PC industry is twice (actually even more so) as competitive today as it was back then. And Amiga pretty much had the home video game segment cornered. It still tanked.

Cheers
Gubbi

To be fair, the Amiga didn't so much tank, as was driven hard and fast into the ground by a management team so mind numbingly incompetent that they make George Bush look like Solomon.

And also, it didn't have home video games anything like cornered. It had followings in various niche markets and a healthy line in games. Decent management could have capitalised on that. Come to think of it, my mum could probably have made more of a success out of that situation than Medhi et-al. But in reality they were more concerned with stuffing their pockets with as much money as possible and then running away.

But yeah - any supposed competitor to the PC would have a hell of a mountain to climb. You'd have to somehow get millions of people to buy your alternative. Like maybe if you pretended it was a games machine, or entertainment system, and then they discovered that you could do all kind of other things with it and you didn't need that PC anymore... and then they get used to it and want a more powerful model...

 

[London Geezer]

To be fair, the Amiga didn't so much tank, as was driven hard and fast into the ground by a management team so mind numbingly incompetent that they make George Bush look like Solomon.

Please don't insult Solomon.

 

[archie4oz]

Sony has made it very easy and reasonable cheap to get Linux for PS2 and use it as a PC. But despite all this Sony have sold how many kits ?

Well the initial production runs were around 12,000 for each of the three major regions sold out rather quickly and a successive production run in the US sold out as well, so you're talking at least 48,000 kits... Over all, I'd say probably around 50K-60K... Anyhow, it wasn't something that Sony was planning on selling in big numbers, and something merely tossed out there for enthusiasts to play with... It's certainly done far better than Yaroze did...