IBM Corp has duly launched the OS/2 Warp release 4.0 which includes VoiceType speech recognition, plus support for the Java programming language. It also bundles in Netscape Communications Corp’s Navigator browser and implements OpenDoc. It costs $250 if you are new to OS/2, $150 as an upgrade. IBM claims that since 1992, it has shipped over 14 million copies of OS/2 Warp, but no-one knows how many of those were stuck to the covers of computer magazines and went out with the garbage – but it says bravely that it expects Warp 4 to accelerate shipments, and its ability to deliver low-cost speech recognition should push it into vertical markets. Minimum system requirements are a 33MHz 80486 machine with 12Mb to 16Mb memory, and speech navigation and dictation need a Pentium. The estimated number of actual users is 11million, compared with 140m for Windows, but unfortunately for IBM, the 3,000 largest OS/2 customers, which include big banks and insurers, generate 25% to 30% of IBM’s $72bn annual revenue , so they are not people it wants to annoy. Biggest weakness of OS/2 is that it does not support 32-bit Windows applications, and IBM’s answer for that is that users should run them on the server under Citrix Systems Inc’s WinFrame/Enterprise v1.6 multi-user version of Windows NT, since the product supports OS/2 as a client, but that sells for $6,000 for 15 concurrent users and $1,000 for each extra five.
