Two ostensibly unconnected items last week are causing observers to speculate that IBM Corp’s OS/2 may not be with us for too much longer. At the end of the week, IBM announced that its chief strategist, James Cannavino, will leave the company on March 31, which put a whole new gloss on an odd little item that appeared in Robert Cringely’s Infoworld column at the beginning of the week. Cringely asserted that friends of his went to IBM with complaints that running OS/2 Warp on Peripheral Component Interconnect bus systems with Matrox boards installed caused Warp to crash, damaging data at the same time. The problem, he says turned out to be an admitted bug in the Warp kernel – and one that IBM is not going to fix, because, they were told, the current version is the end of the road for iAPX-86 versions of OS/2. Everything after Warp will be aimed directly at the PowerPC. The connection is that Cannavino was the last top IBM staffer with enough emotional capital tied up in OS/2 to prevent the thing being killed, and once he is out of the way, it will have no champion. But unless there are going to be future iAPX-86 versions, there seems very little likelihood that developers will write applications on the promise of an untried PowerPC line alone, so that while OS/2 for PowerPC may well appear when IBM’s RISC personal computer line finally arrives in May, it is not likely to survive for long. Cannavino’s story is that he has wanted to run his own show for some time, but chairman Louis Gerstner was restrained in his praise and after reviewing Cannavino’s career said only I appreciate his contributions to IBM and wish him all the best in the future.
