Steve Ballmer: Our goal of making OS/2 the next generation OS

Date: August 1988

Snippet
To: Steve Ballmer From: Adrian King Cc: Bill gates: Mark Mackaman; Mike Maples; Cameron Myhrvold; Gabe Newwell; Russ Werner Date: August 22nd, 1988 Re: Running Windows Applications on OS/2 Presentation Manager

Introduction

Bill recently sent out some lengthy, eloquent, email concerning the development of a Window mapping layer which allow Windows apps to run unchanged on OS/2 Presentation Manager.

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OS/2 will ship in October. An optimistic mid '98 shipment of the compatibility layer would seem to be of little interest to most Windows ISVs. We should drive Windows users and ISVs towards PM as quickly as possible rather than giving them an excuse to delay.

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Ignoring the superior graphics capability of PM (are there really that many ISVs dying to do cubic splines?), it is very difficult to point to early specific advantages of PM.

We all believe that fundamentally OS/2 with PM really is a better platform for a superior business applications: 16 Mb menmort, a real task scheduler, good swapping algorithms, no expanded/extended memory weirdness ...

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I think we need to think very carefully about how much we want Windows to compete with OS/2 in the OEM channel and for ISV's attention. The strains that show in our strategy now are temporary, and should not allow us to lose sight of the goal of making OS/2 the next generation operating system as quickly as possible ..

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/px00031.pdf