When OS/2 was released it was clearly better than the Microsoft Operating system, yet very few people seemed to take notice. Why did os/2 no kick Micro$ofts butt?

Websites or thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks

David

Money, Money, Money and lack of foresight??

Its because all the young techies wanted to be Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout who bucked Big Blue and made millions. No one admired Watson or Gerstner, old fogie stuffed shirts with big corporation rules. When we had OS/2 we worked through OS problems with support, none of this MS reboot or reinstall garbage. Those were the days!!!

Perhaps because of media bias more than anything else, because ibm was a major rival to oems in hardware, because os/2 naturally does require a number of adjustments to config.sys to work properly, which could have been a bit frightening for new users to do directly, as in many cases there was no way to do it indirectly.

OS/2 was clearly ahead of its time. A true 32 bit op sys, compared to Win at same time. Unfortunately IBM made an initial decision to not co-venture Bill's op sys and ideas along with IBM's OS/2. Also, IBM didn't view the PC in the same light as it's other systems. The PC was just considered an intelligent workstation, but IBM was not really interested in promoting or using the same marketing savy used for it's other products as for the PC. They knew that the PC would have to be marketed on the retail level for it to take off and that it would become a "commodity item", like cell phones are today. IBM never wanted to market any item that would become a commodity (price sensitive item). With those ideas in mind, Bill's ideas didn't make total sense to IBM along with other concepts that Bill presented at the time.

This overall concept was brought down to the marketing level. As reps, we were not encouraged to market PC's, except in large volumes focusing on the business enterprise. We were not interested in really marketing it to consumers because of the support issues involved and what was expected from IBM at the time - total support, which was IBM's trademark to fame! IBM did try the retail concept, but unfortunately had too much of the large business mentality associated with it.

It ultimately cost IBM control and market share of the PC environment and along came the Dell's and Compaqs of the world, not to mention the "me too" clones. It's funny because most of the time it's the business world that dictates products down to the consumer, but in this case, it was the consumer in an indirect way that dictated the business world to move towards the Windows concept.

Yes, in today's PC's, OS/2 really would have operated at "Warp" speed!