Officially, IBM (in the person of Entry Level Systems vic president Jim Cannavino) says that Big Blue will now "endorse" Windows for "entry-level" hardware, and will drop any plans to create its own DOS-based version of Presentation Manager (the so-called PM Lite).
Presentation Manager issue has become so intensely political (Soft letter, 11/7/89) that hardly anyoen seems willing to take the announcement at face value.
Lotus and WordPerfect are integrating their Presentation Manager products to help counter Microsoft's growing strength in applications.
* Software politics will rescue Presentation Manager. We've been watching surveys that track enthusiasm for PM, and we've noticed an interesting phenomenon: As PM becomes more of a real product, fewer end users say they'll adopt it.
Do you expect Presentation Manager to cut into sales of Windows titles?
The Presentation Manager products we see are windows remakes--PageMaker, Packrat, and Excel--and offer no real advantages under OS/2.
He is working with other mathematicians from across the country to identify the best among many projects and to clarify their implications for the Windows and Presentation Manager environments and for various related projects in the sciences--the physics project (CUPLE) based at the University of Maryland and the chemistry project based at the Universities of Texas and Wisconsin, for example.
Implementation will require mathematical judgment and object-oriented programming depth to ensure coherence and integration--through Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)--among the mathematical primitives that will be created, as close to the systems level as possible, in the complex Windows and Presentation Manager programming environments.
WINDOWS: A CANDID APPRAISAL Within the last year, Windows has made a remarkable transition from a
Presentation Manager training-wheels product to a serious development environment.
Such software is now available not only for the Macintosh, but for the DOS-based Windows and OS/2-based
Presentation Manager platforms as well.