This was originally published on August 5, 1995. This is a fascinating response to IBM's Windows 95 Hype Article. IBM did a good job knocking Windows 95 down in the technical game, but look at how Microsoft handles it.

Microsoft's answers to IBM's

"The Real Story about Windows 95 - 15 Questions to Ask Microsoft"

The purpose of this document is to answer the questions raised in IBM's document entitled "The Real Story about Win 95 -or- 15 Questions to ask Microsoft".

Here is some suggested text:

IBM's document repeatedly presents a series of arcane technical arguments concerning some of the design decisions Microsoft made in producing Windows 95. These can be grouped into the following three areas:

Multitasking: Windows 95 and OS/2 take essentially the same approach to running 16-bit Windows applications - that is to run them in the way as Windows 3.1 would. The reason for this is compatibility. 16-bit Windows applications were designed to be executed in a cooperatively multitasked environment. While OS/2 offers a non-default option to run 16-bit Windows applications preemptively, it does so by loading a full copy of Windows 3.1 for each application, which requires a great deal of memory and reduces performance. This option also introduces compatibility problems because 16-bit Windows applications were not designed to be run this way. For example, applications that use OLE are not able to exchange information in this mode. So this option offers marginally better multitasking at the cost of reduced performance, higher memory requirements, and incompatibility. If the benefits of this OS/2 feature were worth its cost, why is it not turned on by default? Further, if preemptive multitasking of applications is important, why has IBM stated that OS/2 will not run 32-bit applications designed for Windows 95 and Windows NT, which have as their key features preemptive multitasking and multiple threads of execution?

Robustness: There is no evidence that OS/2 is any more robust than Windows 3.1 when running 16-bit Windows applications, and Windows 95 has a number of important robustness improvements that go beyond Windows 3.1 and OS/2 such as increased system resources, per-thread resource tracking, and better recovery from application failures. The only case that could be made for OS/2 in this regard is that its option to run each 16-bit Windows application in a separate session adds some protection, but at a great cost in resources and compatibility as explained above.

Ease of Use: The Windows 95 user interface is the result of thousands of hours of usability testing and has proven to be an easier and more productive user interface than OS/2. PC World and PC Computing magazines each conducted usability tests comparing Windows 95 to OS/2 and Windows 3.1 in their August 1995 issues. In both cases, Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 proved to be significantly easier to use than OS/2.

Click here for part two.

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