Advocates are people who help bring people to WinCustomize.com. Whenever you link to your personal page, an post you've written, a skin you've made, or even a skin someone else has made that you've recommended on your personal page, you get an advocate point when someone visits. For example, on Neowin I made a post talking about Liquid 2. I did the same on some other sites that linked to Liquid 2. When someone clicks on that link, it gets counted as a referral which in turn counts as an advocate point.
Users who get more advocate points in a given month than I get often get sent various WinCustomize.com goodies in the mail (though in June, I was #1 which is the first time that's happened since we started doing this). Thank you to everyone who helps bring people to WinCustomize.com and spreads the word on the power of skinning and customizing your desktop experience!
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Frogboy | 38,751 |
| Steve Grenier | 31,174 | |
| mormegil | 12,610 | |
| FilkoSE | 10,528 | |
| Jairo Boudewyn | 9,754 | |
| wstaylor | 9,445 | |
| The Skins Factory | 9,228 | |
| JJ Ying | 8,069 | |
| D. Arnaez | 6,918 | |
| Apocalypse_67 | 5,468 |
I used to be an OS/2 zealot. You hear about Mac bigots and Linuz zealots, well, let me tell you just how bad of an OS/2 zealot I used to be -- I can recount various key moments in my younger life based on their proximity to the release of IBM's OS/2 2.0 (March 31, 1992).
"When did you and your wife meet?" is a common question. My brain pages through the records and goes "Ah, it was just after the release of OS/2 and therefore it must have been in Spring of 1992."
Birthdays, anniversaries, whatever, I have trouble remembering. But OS/2 2.0's release date is burned into my mind. And for the subsequent 6 years, I devoted nearly every waking hour to making OS/2 succeed. It wasn't about money. It wasn't about business. It was a cause. OS/2 was my cause. It was a better way of doing things. Some people get wrapped up in ideologies. Other people go on religious crusades. I was on an OS crusade.
And we lost. Badly.
Another date I remember well was Fall of 1996. That was when Microsoft release Windows NT 4.0. And within a year, the OS/2 market died. Microsoft's effective FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) combined with IBM's unwillingness to strongly back OS/2 made it ripe to be toppled over by Windows NT 4.0 which, while not as good as OS/2 Warp 4, was "good enough" and had good industry support.
By 1998, our once thriving company was laying people off and struggling to survive. And I wasn't a 20 year old college student anymore. I was 26, married, with a young son. I had responsibilities to my family and my employees. We limped our way into the Windows market, tail between our legs. Nowadays, we're a pure Microsoft shop. .NET solutions across the board. Microsoft SQL. Microsoft Office. Our company makes a great demonstration of Microsoft solutions now. Which is pretty ironic since we were once OS/2 zealots. I'm not a Windows zealot today. I'm not even a Windows advocate really. It's just business.
The romanticism of OS technology has warn off and there's nothing as relatively cutting edge as OS/2 was back then. So now I don't really think of the OS choice much beyond market share and what makes good business sense. Now it's about the software WE make. I am still dedicated to a cause -- making stuff that enables people to use their computers however they want. And I want to make software that is cool and useful. That's where software like Object Desktop and now ThinkDesk comes in.
So today IBM and Microsoft announced that they're closing the books on that uglyness that was OS/2. Almost 10 years after Windows 95 was released, Microsoft is paying IBM off to not sue them over all the "unpleasantness" that Microsoft was involved in to ensure that 95%+ of you are using Microsoft Windows instead of IBM OS/2. We'll never know if we would have been better off if OS/2 had won out instead of Windows. But at least IBM got to recoup some of their costs for trying.
WinCustomize.com never closes. But for those of you with real jobs in the United States, we hope you have a happy 4th of July weekend! Enjoy the good weather if available! 
WinCustomize.com is funded largely by software developer Stardock (whom I work for). Stardock, which today makes popular Windows enhancement and utilities software didn't start out that way. From 1993 to 1999 Stardock mostly made software for IBM's OS/2 operating system.
In those days, the "OS Wars" were very spirited and bitter at times. IBM and Microsoft were vying to be the successor to DOS. Microsoft's answer at the key moment was Windows 3.1. IBM's solution was OS/2. Windows obviously won, but when one looks at it in hindsight, one has to wonder how this occurred.
In 1993, users had two choices. They could run DOS + Windows 3.1 which was, to put it charitably, not very stable. Windows 3.1 could run Windows programs and it could run most DOS programs (though not games, for that, users would have to exit back to DOS to play them).
The second choice was OS/2. OS/2 could also run Windows programs. And it ran DOS programs far better than Windows could and in many cases, even better than DOS (because it could give DOS programs more "conventional" memory). Even DOS games ran under OS/2. On top of that, OS/2 had an object-oriented desktop shell called the Workplace Shell (which Windows 95 borrowed heavily from to make "Explorer"), had preemptive multitasking, protected memory, a flat memory model, an accelerated game environment called DIVE (before there was a DirectX), and could run true 32bit OS/2 programs which supported multithreading.
So how did OS/2 lose? OS/2 was so far in advanced of Windows at the time. It could run all the software Windows could run and then some. It was more powerful. It was faster. It was pushed by IBM. It was cheaper even. This is something Linux advocates should think about, btw. For all the touting Linux (or Mac) users give their respective OSes, it is unlikely that any OS will ever have as big of an advantage over Windows as OS/2 did in 1993. And yet it lost.
Again, how did OS/2 manage to lose out? The answer is complicated. For one thing, Microsoft was able to leverage the power of inertia and make special deals with OEMs. IBM had to license Windows for a set price from Microsoft. There were OEMs at the time who claimed that Microsoft was selling DOS 6 + Windows 3.1 to them for $10 and including Office with it if they agreed not to have any systems with OS/2. Meanwhile, IBM was supposedly having to pay Microsoft $20+ for each copy of OS/2 in licensing fees and IBM, operating under a previous anti-trust consent decree couldn't blatantly sell OS/2 at a loss like Microsoft was doing with Windows at the time.
By the time OS/2 was starting to pick up ground, Windows 95 had arrived and a year later, Windows NT 4.0 arrived which, while not quite as good as OS/2, was "good enough" and Microsoft had gotten the third party support through every effort they could think of (and every "effort" later got them into trouble).
So now IBM and Microsoft have settled their differences with Microsoft paying IBM $850 MILLION. I guess one has to wonder whether all those OS/2 ISVs who also suffered immensely could seek settlements. 
Go, a company that helped pioneer pen computing has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft. Go's ordeal with Microsoft was told in detail in the excellent book StartUP
Read the full thing.
Thanks in large part to the efforts by our partners at Paradox, Galactic Civilizations II is getting some great coverage over in Europe:
Finland:
http://www.pelit.fi/uutiset/uutinen.asp?id=15715
Germany:
http://www.gamestar.de/news/pc-spiele/strategie/26422/
Microsoft has brought back veteran product closer, Chris Jones to manage the Longhorn project. Chris Jones was one of the primary forces behind getting Whistler (Windows XP) out the door.
He replaces Joe Peterson in managing Longhorn's day to day movement towards release.
"Chris Jones…was brought back from COSD to save the (Longhorn) product," said one source.
Longhorn has seen a number of features removed during its beta journey including WinFS, the Business Framework, the Side bar, the scripted shell, and other elements. Longhorn is currently scheduled for release in mid-2006. The first public beta is due out this Summer.
Mary Jo Foley has more..
In a few days, we'll be closing the beta to new users. Gamers will be able to pre-order at the discounted price but the beta will not be available again to try until late Fall.
So if you want to be part of the beta program, pre-order now.