Re: A radical idea in OSs

   Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 17:57:51 CST
   To: vsta@cisco.com
   From: David Jeske <jeske@genesis.isdn.uiuc.edu>
   Subject: A radical idea in OSs

   Does this sound like a decent idea? I mean, if you forget that Microsoft
   practically owns the intel world for just a second...

It's a great idea. People have been trying to do this for years.
Unfortunately, no one is very successful for the very reason that you
would rather ignore.

People buy OS's to run applications. No one will buy VSTa until there
is a substantial base of applications that you can run on it. But no
one will port to VSTa until there is a substantial installed base who
are willing to pay money for application software. An obvious way
around this is to be binary compatible with a large number of
applications (IBM's strategy for OS/2) so that porting is not
required.

For example, the ability to run Win32 apps on VSTa would be worth some
money. However I doubt any of us could muster the resources required
to achieve it.

Chris Maeda
Received on Mon Jan 23 19:54:33 1995