🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3om4cq$7...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> khc...@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu writes:

 > I am not quite sure, as they will be abandoning the current
 > millions of Win3.x users.  I will wait until most of them have
 > upgraded before jumping on, which takes a couple years at *least*.

 I am of the belief that home users are driving the upgrade at the
 moment. Corporate users usually respond slowly in upgrade as they have
 no interests in their PCs and it is usually a nightmare to re-learn
 new computing skills. However, home users will gladly get the best
 hardware/software that suits their needs. They are usually the pioneers
 to use new software.

 Therefore, even though there are millions of Win3.x users, many of them
 are actually corporate users who do spreadsheet and accounting. The
 first batch of upgrade will be in the home market, and there is where
 game companies make the most money.

 > Most != 99%.  I highly doubt DOS/Win have 99% of games market,
 > what happened to the Mac?  I trust about 80% is closer.  And the
 > point is, even DOS/Win is dominant now, Mac is still a viable
 > platform.  In the same way, even if Win95 dominates, OS/2 will
 > still be a viable platform.  And porting from Win95 to OS/2 is
 > *much* easier than DOS/Win to OS/2, due the similarities in design
 > (flat application address, multithreading, etc).

 OS/2 and Mac definitely are viable platforms for gaming. However,
 it is the market that dictates wether a platform will be successful
 or not. The history has shown this clearly to Apple II, Commodore,
 and Amiga market. If no vendors want to support the platform, they
 will simply fade away as time goes on.

 > I don't think OS/2 games development will not change, IBM is
 > starting to push game developments in OS/2, released a game
 > development kits, more advertising, etc.

 If Win95 fails miserably upon its release, it definitely will change.
 But I doubt it is likely to change much to be of any importance at
 the moment. If you know the history of OS/2 1.x, you will also know
 that IBM has burnt a lot of software companies before with their
 promises in the past, and it is doubtful that those companies have
 forgotten and are so willingly to take the risks again so soon.

 > >I hardly think that this is true by now.  There are roughly 500,000 beta
 > >testers now which is the largest testing program for a piece of software
 > 
 > Nope, not beta testers.  That 50k copies is called "Preview", it's
 > for you to *evaluate* Win95, not for you to give bug reports.

 That is not true again. Microsoft does welcome all the people who
 are participate in the "preview" program to send bug reports to them.
 In fact, they even include a program in the preview software to do
 just that. One can just dial up Microsoft's Network to send them the
 report, or call them on the hotline.

 > Many of those tester are not going to "hack the crap out of the
 > system to find problems", most of them will just install it, play
 > around with it, and that's it.  Only people who are *paid* to do
 > so will "hack the crap out of the system to find problems", people
 > *paying* for the beta is for a "first look".

 When Microsoft launched the preview program here, I had seen over
 1,000+ people attending the launch. Microsoft even ran into inventory
 problem and there were not enough copies of Win95 preview to distribute.
 Most of the people who attended the launch were from large corporations
 as well as government departments, planning to do developments on the
 new platforms. Wether they will be interested to hack the systems or
 not, I will leave that to you to speculate on.

 > Even if it's true, fine, I will switch to Win95 *if* and *when*
 > OS/2 is not longer the best for me.  But I highly doubt if it will
 > happen, and it's not a concern to me now.

 True, you are definitely entitled to your own opinions. I am just
 trying to discuss the issue from the other side so that other readers
 can know both side of the story. That's what newsgroup is for isn't
 it?

--
Email : hkc...@hkchan.pc.my