IBM and Microsoft Corp were yesterday trying to minimise the damage done to IBM’s strategy for the desktop by a story in the Wall Street Journal on Monday to the effect that Microsoft was abandoning OS/2 in favour of the forthcoming 32-bit version of Windows. IBM rushed out a statement that it was now shipping the 32-bit Version 2.0 of OS/2 – but in fact it has been shipping since October: IBM has simply never before publicly stated that it was shipping. It now says that small numbers of copies are going out, and that full availability is expected later this year. As for Microsoft, to keep the peace, it appears to have decided to attach the OS/2 name to a forthcoming operating system release that will support applications written for OS/2 and its Presentation Manager interface as well as ones written for MS-DOS and for Windows. Software developers are however unlikely to be fooled by the semantics, and the vast majority of future development effort is likely to go into applications for Windows 3.0, to the detriment of any further OS/2 development work except where IBM mainframe users are the specific target customers.
