Innovators on board; masses still waiting - OS/2 LAN Manager

Software Magazine, Nov, 1989 by Paul Korzeniowski

INNOVATORS ON BOARD; MASSES STILL WAITING

The OS/2 operating system from Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., which was announced in April 1987, promised many new features: a graphics interface, oodles of main memory and true multitasking capabilities.

But the high cost of the IBM PS/2 microcomputer and a lack of applications have made OS/2 acceptance less than lightning quick in the mass data processing market.

"The migration to OS/2 has been a struggle," noted Stephen Wood, vice president of marketing and development at Asymetrix, a start-up software company in Bellevue, WAsh. (Paul Allen, who began Microsoft with William Gates, founded Asymetrix.)

"Because few applications are available, users are not purchasing the operating system. Since users are not buying OS/2, software developers are not delivering OS/2 applications," Wood said.

OS/2 sales have been well below initial projections. International Data Corp. (IDC), a Framingham, Mass., market research firm, said that 65,000 copies of OS/2 were purchased in 1988. In comparison, nine million PC-DOS licenses were sold in that year.

The operating system's slow progress has also stalled Microsoft's attempt to become a premier supplier of LAN networking software. The company hoped that OS/2's local area network component, LAN Manager, would entice software companies designing distributed applications. With LAN Manager, Microsoft could break the strangle-hold that Novell Inc., Provo, Utah, holds on the LAN software market.

To date, interest in LAN Manager has been minimal, according to analysts and software developers. Lee Doyle, a senior industry analyst at IDC, estimated that only a few thousand LAN Manager licenses were sold in 1988. "The market has been slow in responding to Microsoft's new LAN features," he said.

NAMED PIPES, THREADS SUPPORTED

Like the underlying OS/2 operating system, LAN Manager operates in two modes. One mode supports Net-bios, a protocol used on LANs for microcomputers with Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system. Netbios, introduced in 1984, was designed for simple networking functions, such as file and print sharing.

LAN Manager's second mode features named pipes, a new protocol with significant additions, such as security.

J. Scott Haugdahl, a senior technology consultant at Architecture Technology Corp. in Minneapolis, said," Named pipes possesses many featuers that were missing in previous LAN network operating systems." Because the protocol runs on a multitasking operating system, applications may issue commands simultaneously to network file systems. This capability, dubbed threads, intrigues some software developers.

"With threads, a user may easily work with more than one document," said Donna Jeker, director of OEM marketing at DBMs supplier Sybase Inc., Emeryville, Calif. "A user can quickly download mainframe information, insert it into a spreadsheet and print it on a plotter."

Despite the benefits, LAN Manager has garnered little interest among software developers. Part of the problem lies in the richness of OS/2.

OS/2 PRIORITY LISTS

Because the operating system offers many new capabilities, suppliers were forced to outline priority lists. "We are releasing our OS/2 products in stages," said Chuck Middleton, the director of OS/2 product development at WordPerfect Corp., Orem, Utah. "With each successive release, we will take advantage of additional new features."

Vendors appear more intrigued by features like Presentation Manager graphic interface than with LAN Manager. "Independent software vendors are concentrating on OS/2's Presentation Manager and have shown little interest in the operating system's communications capabilities," said John Dunkle, a vice president at Workgroup Technology Inc., a consulting firm in Hampton, N.H.

Indeed, support for the LAN Manager was at the bottom of some vendors' wish lists. "We haven't really thought about LAN support yet," noted Wood at Asymetrix.

In fact, several vendors doubt they will ever support LAN Manager. David Terrie, president of Newport Consulting in Scituate, Mass., said, "LAN Manager is designed for distributed applications. Many vendors examined their DOS applications and discovered they were not worth distributing."

For example, Keith Lowery, a software engineer at Micrografx Inc., a microcomputer software supplier in Richardson, Texas, said, "We do not see a need to add file locking features to our application. Users do not need to lock up their drawings."

The lack of interest among microcomputer software vendors was unexpected. "We were surprised that we had to convince so many microcomputer software vendors that LANs were worthwhile," said Bruce Jacobsen, a group product manager for LAN Manager at Microsoft. "The benefit just seemed so obvious to us."

LANs IN '90s FOR MET LIFE

LAN capabilities are also an after-thought for many users working with OS/i. Northwest Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. in Minneapolis is using Micro Focus' Cobol to design new applications. "We want to offload application development from our IBM mainframe," explained Karl Krammer, the manager of distributed software development at the insurance company.