He says he worked at IBM during the OS/2 years, and that Microsoft never actually stopped working on OS/2, but rather there was code in OS/2 that was licensed from Microsoft and IBM continued to pay Microsoft to develop it until IBM decided to pull the plug much later. He says Microsoft didn't leave OS/2.
I would say that this is most likely incorrect for a few reasons (from what I've read and know), the first three that come to mind:
#1 OS/2 2.11 SMP was the work of one guy contracted by IBM non-MS:
The email I received confirmed the rumor that OS/2 2.11 SMP was largely the work of 1 person who later left IBM. Once that person left and IBM had gotten rid of most of the contractors at Boca Raton Fl (IBM decided to centralized PSP in Austin) the brain drain was so much that OS/2 would never get a client SMP version again. OS/2’s kernal on a P-66 took 2 hours to compile. OS/2 took about 40 minutes to compile on a 2 processor OS/2 2.11 SMP machine (4 P-66’s). IBM would not allow OS/2 internal builds to use the SMP compile. If each compile ate up over 2 hours, imagine how much better OS/2 Warp could have been if the engineers had had an extra hour and 80 minutes after each build to spend testing, fixing, adding, etc.? The fact that OS/2 had an SMP version so early could have made a huge difference the high end market. Unfortunately, IBM failed to capitalize on this and eventually Windows NT (which still can’t match OS/2 2.11’s SMP scalability) took over as the primary SMP client. By the time IBM got around to showing how cool OS/2 SMP was, it was too late.
Source:
https://www.stardock.com/stardock/os2present.html#2 Microsoft
never wanted to help IBM with OS/2 (as that would just sign their own destruction) and instead were just 'riding the bear', and also severely disagreed with IBM's payment model / I severely doubt they would continue to code OS/2 when they didn't agree with the payment model nor wanted to sign their own destruction:
It was just part of, as we used to call it, the time riding the bear. You just had to try to stay on the bear's back and the bear would twist and turn and try to buck you and throw you, but darn, we were going to ride the bear because the bear was the biggest, the most important you just had to be with the bear, otherwise you would be under the bear in the computer industry, and IBM was the bear, and we were going to ride the back of the bear.
In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 50K-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS/2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing.
Source:
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.htmlThere's also the whole fact that IBM and MS had major disagreements with how it should have been designed.
Which is why OS/2 is a far more stable and sanely programmed operating system than Windows. I won't go through all of the reasons why OS/2 had many things implemented ahead of the time by non-MS employees, but they are there. Microsoft only caught up with some of these much later on--and in many instances it was too late (which is why Windows' interface can't scale properly, whereas OS/2's can).
#3 OS/2 PPC was ported and developed internally at IBM and ate their budget for OS/2 as a whole (and is one of the
main reasons why OS/2 was axed by IBM):
I remember in 1997 when we were looking at the OS/2 revenue sales and realizing that NT 4.0 had killed OS/2. When Windows NT 4.0 came out, that pretty much did in OS/2, people migrated from OS/2 to NT incredibly fast. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that about half of the active individual OS/2 user base switched from OS/2 to Windows NT 4.0 within 6 months of its introduction. And IBM, unbeknownst to any of us, had decided to kill OS/2 before OS/2 Warp 4. Warp 4 was in the pipeline already. Gerstner, feeling betrayed by PSP (Personal System Products, a division of IBM) for the PowerPC debacle had ordered PSP eliminated and its assets split up amongst the other divisions, none of which particularly cared about OS/2.
Source:
https://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/endofos2.htmlEDIT: I'd like to add that the elements that OS/2 shares (and doesn't share!) with Windows are quite fascinating. IBM wasn't oblivious as to what was worth keeping and what was utter garbage.
