On 04/10/2017 4:56 AM, Diesel wrote:
....

Entirely IBMS fault, too. They did a great job writing an OS, and an
absolutely terrible job advertising it to recruit users and
developers. Windows NT was born from the fallout.

NT came along earlier when MS hired the VMS architect after DEC
collapsed and he refused to consider OS/2 as viable. The insistence of
IBM on supporting their corporate client base over the personal market
also played into the much less widespread availability of drivers for
consumer PC hardware which was burgeoning and limited market share.
Needing either an installed Windows on the machine "red spine" or an
internal license "blue spine" for the Windows support meant OS/2 on its
own was significantly more expensive to use any Windows apps, another
blow to widespread adoption outside specialty organizations.

All the advertising in the world had no hope in defeating MS/Windows as
IBM was to insular to accept an open hardware model that had already
sailed as the way of the PC market never to be recaptured. With the
unique API/GDI, developers had to develop for both and the support tools
that were supposed to be able to convert never happened. With all the
major hardware players licensing Windows for new machines it was a no
brainer for which OS the existing developers would write and as noted
before IBM didn't subsidize any to have any competition for any consumer
app in time.

The issues within OS/2 in how it handled some of the virtualization
meant still could hang the whole machine in DOS/Windows sessions and
took many, many, many fix packs to work around a lot of those issues by
the time Warp 3 was released.

For enterprise dedicated applications it was indeed "better", but the
market simply wasn't large enough and the cost too high to be viable. A
"lean, mean" outfit with a single talented overseer and the financial
resources of an IBM might have made a product; the real IBM "not so much"...

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