Demise
Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 10:27 am
From the really aggressive (hostile?) reactions that a simple plea for help for an embattled OS/2 product received, I have to conclude that the OS/2 market is indeed doomed to for demise.
I don't want to fight over this, so lets spare us all the flame wars.
But as an old OS/2 "warrior" it makes me very sad indeed to see that way to many people in the OS/2 "community" have a sense of entitlement when it comes to new software.
No company has to develop (new) software for anyone, not in a free market system.
They only write programs if they can make profits in doing so.
No one, I mean no one who has to pay his programmer's western wages has been making profits of OS/2 software in years.
The concept of some lonesome dude, sitting in a closet, hacking away at his code and then hitting it big, finally entertaining his girl friend with your "hard earned money" is silly at best.
Even things as simple as designing and producing a hard paper manual, proof reading of documentation and design of graphical elements, requires an entire team of people.
People who want to get paid for their work. If those folks live in Germany or the US that means they have to be paid in cold, hard western currency.
In countries like Germany it also means having to pay +50% taxes on everything from software to shoe laces for your company.
Software development in countries like the US or Germany is incredibly expensive and a single miss can bankrupt an entire corporation.
Companies like eCS can only afford to keep this up because they work with (good but cheap) Russian programmers.
E.g. PMview hadn't updated their OS/2 product for a looong time and they only do so now on a "pay per upgrade" basis for major version releases.
But even that caused certain people to call for an outright boycott of PMview when they had to insist on charging for major version upgrades.
There was honestly a large majority of people in the OS/2 community who felt that they were entitled to free upgrades for life!
I paid for my upgrades and I didn't waste one minute about it. Even so, the folks from PMview are not making any profits here, they are doing their continued OS/2 development out of courtesy for old customers.
The same goes for Papyrus. They kept up development out of sheer courtesy.
Some people treat them like they are greedy s.o.b. who don't deserve any better, but its not them who need us.
Its the other way around and greedy people don't waste their time trying to make a business in OS/2.
There is no more business to be made in OS/2.
Unless we all learn to extent to the few OS/2 companies left out there the same courtesy we expect for them to extend to us, there will be no more new OS/2 software very, very soon.
That means we ask those companies to pleeeaaase write that OS/2 code for us, we ask them nicely and we are aware that they are doing us a favor with that.
We want quality software for sure, but in any case we can not just go there with a "I'm the customer and the customer is king and therefore you have to be nice to me" attitude.
The customers in the OS/2 market have lost their crown a long time ago. Heck, even the update cycles for the Kiev Elephant become less and less frequent,
So as it seems even in Russia its getting harder and harder to make a living of OS/2!
I don't want to see OS/2 go this way, but for some reason OS/2 users never developed the appreciation for "hold outs" in development that e.g. the Amiga or BeOS people did.
There all you have to do is present a simple spec. sheet and a web site, not even a previous successful product, and people will flood you with actual donations and offers for help.
I've also seen a lot of rip offs resulting from such "overzealous" support, but fact is that by now there are more Amiga users and Amiga companies out there than OS/2 users or companies, How shameful for us!
With OS/2 users the attitude is "you make it for me and then I'll tell you whether I'll bother to pay for it".
I will call the CEO of Papyrus again and tell him that I'm ready to pay him for a new version in advance (even so he didn't ask for it and by law couldn't even take such a payment). But I will also tell him that I understand if he decides that he can't afford the up to $10000.-- in costs to bring that new version to market.
After all, last time he got 7 (seven!) actual orders from the US after having spend an even larger amount of money on the American version.
Maybe I'll even offer to finish the German Papyrus version for free myself.
But if I do that then I won't bother with the American version until certain folks learn to ask Papyrus for that one nicely.
Not for my sake - I wouldn't even bother getting any credit for this, but just for certain folks to go through the exercise so that in the future maybe, just maybe, we can get other companies to come back to OS/2 as well.
I don't want to fight over this, so lets spare us all the flame wars.
But as an old OS/2 "warrior" it makes me very sad indeed to see that way to many people in the OS/2 "community" have a sense of entitlement when it comes to new software.
No company has to develop (new) software for anyone, not in a free market system.
They only write programs if they can make profits in doing so.
No one, I mean no one who has to pay his programmer's western wages has been making profits of OS/2 software in years.
The concept of some lonesome dude, sitting in a closet, hacking away at his code and then hitting it big, finally entertaining his girl friend with your "hard earned money" is silly at best.
Even things as simple as designing and producing a hard paper manual, proof reading of documentation and design of graphical elements, requires an entire team of people.
People who want to get paid for their work. If those folks live in Germany or the US that means they have to be paid in cold, hard western currency.
In countries like Germany it also means having to pay +50% taxes on everything from software to shoe laces for your company.
Software development in countries like the US or Germany is incredibly expensive and a single miss can bankrupt an entire corporation.
Companies like eCS can only afford to keep this up because they work with (good but cheap) Russian programmers.
E.g. PMview hadn't updated their OS/2 product for a looong time and they only do so now on a "pay per upgrade" basis for major version releases.
But even that caused certain people to call for an outright boycott of PMview when they had to insist on charging for major version upgrades.
There was honestly a large majority of people in the OS/2 community who felt that they were entitled to free upgrades for life!
I paid for my upgrades and I didn't waste one minute about it. Even so, the folks from PMview are not making any profits here, they are doing their continued OS/2 development out of courtesy for old customers.
The same goes for Papyrus. They kept up development out of sheer courtesy.
Some people treat them like they are greedy s.o.b. who don't deserve any better, but its not them who need us.
Its the other way around and greedy people don't waste their time trying to make a business in OS/2.
There is no more business to be made in OS/2.
Unless we all learn to extent to the few OS/2 companies left out there the same courtesy we expect for them to extend to us, there will be no more new OS/2 software very, very soon.
That means we ask those companies to pleeeaaase write that OS/2 code for us, we ask them nicely and we are aware that they are doing us a favor with that.
We want quality software for sure, but in any case we can not just go there with a "I'm the customer and the customer is king and therefore you have to be nice to me" attitude.
The customers in the OS/2 market have lost their crown a long time ago. Heck, even the update cycles for the Kiev Elephant become less and less frequent,
So as it seems even in Russia its getting harder and harder to make a living of OS/2!
I don't want to see OS/2 go this way, but for some reason OS/2 users never developed the appreciation for "hold outs" in development that e.g. the Amiga or BeOS people did.
There all you have to do is present a simple spec. sheet and a web site, not even a previous successful product, and people will flood you with actual donations and offers for help.
I've also seen a lot of rip offs resulting from such "overzealous" support, but fact is that by now there are more Amiga users and Amiga companies out there than OS/2 users or companies, How shameful for us!
With OS/2 users the attitude is "you make it for me and then I'll tell you whether I'll bother to pay for it".
I will call the CEO of Papyrus again and tell him that I'm ready to pay him for a new version in advance (even so he didn't ask for it and by law couldn't even take such a payment). But I will also tell him that I understand if he decides that he can't afford the up to $10000.-- in costs to bring that new version to market.
After all, last time he got 7 (seven!) actual orders from the US after having spend an even larger amount of money on the American version.
Maybe I'll even offer to finish the German Papyrus version for free myself.
But if I do that then I won't bother with the American version until certain folks learn to ask Papyrus for that one nicely.
Not for my sake - I wouldn't even bother getting any credit for this, but just for certain folks to go through the exercise so that in the future maybe, just maybe, we can get other companies to come back to OS/2 as well.
