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The Sad Parable of OS/2
Still-in-Mourning writes "IBM's first 32-bit version of its advanced PC operating system was released 10 years ago this month. It was better than anything around, yet it failed. Its hopes were pinned on many of the same things we hope today will bring Linux to the forefront. What lessons are to be learned? Will we learn them? A glimpse of a sorry chapter in computing history."
I used OS/2 at work from late 1994 until February 2002, when I finally switched to Linux. And damn, Nautilus (the Windows Explorer clone) is just plain sad. It really is just as bad as Windows, maybe even a little worse, if that's possible.
If OS/2 had won, then GNOME and KDE would be copying a good GUI instead of copying a piece of shit. Or, to put it more generally: if OS/2 had won, things would be better, simply because the product was better. Sure, the "political" situation for would be the same (maybe even a bit more intense since OS/2 would be harder for "open source" to beat than Windows was), but the user experience would be about a decade ahead of where we are right now. So yeah, I wish OS/2 had won.
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As far as I could tell, no one outside IBM was buying the PS/2. At least, I've never seen a single one outside the company. At the height of its popularity, it was estimated that OS/2 had over 10 million users.
IBM could have stayed ahead and taken over the industry, but a lot of factors conspired to prevent it from happening. Much of it was due to IBM attitude. First off, mainframe mentality ruled (And still rules, to a large extent) the company. Upper management still viewed the PC as a toy. Certainly they would never have dreamt that a user might actually want to multitask with it, even though OS/2 featured preemptive multitasking.
Further there was the IBM tendency to do a thing and then sit back and rest on their laurels. They go into maintenance mode and don't continue active research and development of innovative new features. IBM business process is still not geared toward a completed project where live development is still taking place.
As for marketing, well it is said that IBM couldn't market eternal life if they had sole rights. They had no idea of their target demographic and they tried to market the product to Joe Average User. This resulted in Joe Average User getting pissed off with the painful installation process. And the installation was painful. IBM could have done something about that, but they were resting on their laurels (See previous point.)
Furthermore, IBM's own software did not strive to show off the operating system at all. Most of the utilites they shipped were straight windows ports. This resulted in poor performance on the platform. I made a comment in a forum at one point that Netscape for Windows 3.1 actually did a better job of multi-threading than the OS/2 web explorer did. I actually ended up using the DOS version of the document explorer that IBM shipped for documentation because the OS/2 version would block the system input queue while it indexed documents, thus hanging the entire system.
Most people will agree that the death blow was PCCO's refusal to preload OS/2 on their systems (Due to illegal Microsoft bullying.) Since the install process never improved and there was no way to get the system preloaded, that was pretty much all she wrote.
There are still some companies out there using OS/2, and they're paying IBM a lot of money to maintain the product. It's mostly banks or other shops with other IBM iron. OS/2 always did talk to the mainframes very well. But OS/2 lost its chance to be a (or THE) mainstream desktop OS when Microsoft introduced Windows 95. Windows 95 was less stable, still didn't feature preemptive multitasking for all programs and had a far less robust interface, but it was good enough that most people didn't care.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, it was (gasp) MICROSOFT (gasp). Think about that before you flame!
Actually this isn't exactly true. Originally IBM did contract MS to write OS/2 however by the time they reached version 3 Windows started to gain in popularity so they focused on that and IBM took over OS/2 entirely. If you read the second link a little more carefully it claims IBM re-wrote everything starting from the 1.x base. That became OS/2 Warp and MS took said version 3 and renamed it to Windows NT.