IBM Corp has of late won itself a lamentable reputation for disappointing its staunchest fans. A whole army of camp followers truly believed in the PowerPC crusade as outlined by IBM and are left bitterly disappointed by its abject failure. There were fewer true believers when it came to OS/2, but there were many people convinced that OS/2 was a much more solid product than any of Microsoft Corp’s offerings, and came to believe when Windows95 came out that Microsoft had got the corporate market so muddled as to whether to go Windows95, wait for Windows NT 4 or say to hell with it and stay with 3.1 until Cairo arrived that with one more push, IBM might really have started to cause deep wounds with OS/2. But now, reports PC Week, even true believer William Zachmann, the president of Canopus Research Inc in Duxbury, Massachusetts has lost faith, saying that little support now exists for OS/2 in IBM’s executive suite, adding that the company’s lukewarm backing for the product has effectively turned it into a lame duck; even insiders seem to concur. He said that at a conference last week in Toronto, senior IBM officials conspicuously failed to bring up OS/2 until it was raised by an analyst, but he believes that even at this late stage, OS/2 could still succeed if only IBM tried – But I just believe they are going to pack it in.
