>>>Once it was possible for OS/2 to do a decent job running Windows apps, the incentive for ISVs to develop PM-based apps kind of evaporated. Vendor after vendor abandonded any plans they ever had to go OS/2 native.
This was a basic problem that IBM never was able to solve. By providing backward compatibility with DOS/Windows programs (which they needed to do) at the time that this was MS's only offering (1991-95), IBM created a situation where vendors has less incentive to develop OS/2-based applications since Windows-based applications could work on OS/2 and DOS/Windows. MS did a good job of convincing journalists that there wasn't any compelling functional advantage to going to a new operating system until, of course, they reversed course when Win95 was ready. At this point, MS and other applications vendors then sold "upgrades" to Win95.
>>>After a while you couldn't even get OS/2 with Win-OS/2 bundled, so you had to go buy a copy of Windows to make it work, thus removing the incentive of even the rabid anti-MS crowd, leaving only the companies who had painted their doors blue and really didn't give a crap about Windows apps to keep OS/2 from a final death.
I think that this isn't accurate. Even the latest version of OS/2, Warp 4.0, includes Win-OS/2. IBM did sell a version without Windows included that was designed to work with pre-installed Windows 3.1. This was to avoid having to pay another fee to MS for Windows when the computer that it was going on already had DOS/Windows installed.
In retrospect, they might have been better off selling only this version with the idea that the user would load it on top of the DOS/Windows already on their computer, keeping their existing system and adding new functionality on top. Of course, that falls under the category of 20-20 hindsight.
Wm Chaney |
