Prompt's TechBlog

Back in the mid-nineties, when I was a bright eyed young tech writer charting the rise of the desktop PC (which was still quite the novelty for most people) IBM was spending a lot of marketing dollars on pushing its desktop operating system, OS/2 Warp, as a consumer product. I wasn't convinced. Sure, OS/2 might be super stable and have all sorts of clever features that corporate IT types go wild for, but it just wasn't friendly enough for home users. I wrote an article which said as much, and received much flack from OS/2 fanatics because of it.

But as usual I was right, OS/2 never made it into the consumer market and struggled to compete with Windows in the business space too. IBM has now finally decided to drop the product altogether, and supporters have begun a campaign to persuade the company to open up the source code. I think it's unlikely, since I'm sure the idea had already occurred to IBM and if they were going to do it, they would have done it by now.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they have a change of heart, and here's why: IBM doesn't really understand consumers and could never successfully turn OS/2 into a decent consumer operating system, but the open source community certainly could. In the open source space, the operating system which has the most mindshare is of course Linux, and a lot of effort is being devoted to turn what is essentially a server platform into a consumer friendly desktop OS. But no matter how much the penguin fanciers wish it, this just isn't going to happen any time soon - Linux is still too difficult for consumers.

Imagine what could be achieved if all of those extremely talented and dedicated open source developers were given a ready made desktop operating system to get their teeth into. I think OS/2 would be a much better starting point for a serious open source rival to Windows on the desktop than Linux could ever be. Here's hoping.