Establishing OS/2 as the dominant workstation standard

From Techrights

Date: March 1989

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March 17, 1989

Nearly four years have elapsed since the initiation of our Joint Development Agreement ..

It is critical that we develop and articulate a strategy to establish OS/2 as the dominant workstation standard. We must communicate a single message to our respective organizations, independent software developers and customers ..

We should be working together in five areas of systems software:

1. Standard Edition and Networking

2. Database, Communications and Workgroup Services

3. Portable OS/2

4. DOS and Windows

5. Tools and Languages

Packaging

We must restructure our systems software offerings so as the customer can purchase only the components appropriate to his needs ..

It is our proposal that we pursue the oppurtunities for OS/2 and DOS as follows.

Standard Edition: .. The contents of the base SKU should be limited to the needs of the standalone user ..

Development:

Joint work on kernel and presentation manager Microsoft responsible for peer-to-peer OS/2 (and DOS) networking (IBM responsible for wide-area/heterogeneous connectivity - see below)

Business:

Two way royalty for base SKUs Royalty to Microsoft for networking

Database Communications and Workgroup Services

Microsoft believes that IBM should repackage the components of Extended Edition, and offer them desperately from the base operating system. Microsoft believes the separate offerings should be:

- A Database (SQL) server package for OS/2 servers

- a Communications package (key SAA and OSI protocols and interfaces) for OS/2 servers

- a Communications package for OS/2 workstations

- a Mail Store and Forward package for OS/2 servers

Microsoft believes that IBM should separate out the "front-end" or "tools" pieces of Extended Edition into one or more separate offerings. and offer them separately from the above offerings. Microsoft would not license these front-end pieces ...

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http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/px00068.pdf