>>That article is kinda wrong. O/S2 was a flop all by itself. The reason it failed is that IBM tied it to P/S2. You might remember this, if you were in the business back in ~1987.
OS/2 flopped, all right, but it wasn't PS/2 specific, at least for ver. 2.1, which was what I started with about 1991-2 on a locally built 486 clone. That's the time when MS employees were going onto bulletin boards pretending to be unhappy OS/2 users and slamming it, and MS was encouraging box makers to not offer it as a pre-load option and hardware companies to not write drivers for it. (By the way, it always was pretty stable for me, more so than the Win95 that I am using now.)
But, IBM's marketing of OS/2 was not very good. It never had any focus. And MS's FUD was shameless. I remember reading a statement from a MS VP saying that OS/2 wasn't innovative at all because it only offered features that MS had promised to put in the upcoming Windows 4.0, which finally became Win95, about three years later. The uncritical acceptance of the press of that statement, comparing a real product with promises was quite amazing to me. And, I was in awe of the ability of the MS VP to even think of this argument and make it stick. I really mean that in a positive way--If you're playing the PR game, play it well, as he did.
So, while MS did take steps to block OS/2, IBM's hesitancy to define the product clearly was an important factor in its inability to become a viable OS for the market.
Wm Chaney |
