Re: What's new with Oberon/F?

Martin, Marc (Marc.Martin@PSS.Boeing.com)
Thu, 14 Nov 1996 09:30:17 -0800

Cuno - Thanks for taking the time to briefly bring us all up to date on
Oberon/F. I look forward to seeing what your plans are for version 1.3,
and will also look forward to the tutorial book!

However, I've always felt that Oberon Microsystems has spent too much
effort on the difficult/obscure things and not enough on the
easy/mainstream things, and I'm a bit dissappointed to see that this
still evident in your latest e-mail. What I mean by this is that
you're spending effort on seemingly obscure things like Direct-to-Com,
SQL database access, the new realtime Portos real-time operating system,
the Denia cross-development system, etc., etc. While I'm sure that this
is all very impressive, your users seem to be wanting fairly mundane
things -- better online documentation, standard text I/O libraries,
simple graphics and sound libraries, threads, better visibility on
future releases, etc., etc. I hope that in the future that OMI is able
to better focus itself on the things it needs to do to survive in the
market, or like it has already been suggested, some of us who are using
Oberon/F right now will be using Java or something else in the years to
come. :-(

As for not having time to deal with feedback, perhaps people should
start posting their feedback to this list instead of directly to you,
and then you would only have to send an occasional message to the list
to keep us all happy instead of a message to each individual e-mail you
get. This list is pretty inactive anyway, and should be used for some
sort of constructive purpose -- I for one would like to see Oberon/F
survive, as I've personally had very good experiences with it!

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how many people actually work
for Oberon Microsystems? It must not be very many if they don't have
time to develop and respond to e-mail at the same time!

--
Marc Martin, marc.martin@boeing.com