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Quora: Why did IBM's OS/2 project lose to Microsoft, given that IBM had much mor

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Ian Manners:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/windows-95-release-(1995)/13978926

Mentore:

--- Quote from: Roderick Klein on August 24, 2022, 03:52:05 pm ---There is indeed a very very long list of reasons.

OS/4 mentions not a decent Office Package. Warp 3 came with IBM works, it was a hell of lot more then Wordpad. I mean at the OS front OS/2 was hit by Microsoft. But look wat happened to Lotus 1-2-3-> Excel. Wordperfect which was well the defacto DOS word processor. Word and Excel pushed these guys out of the market as well.

IBM did pay vendors to publish games for OS/2. Such as Maxis that published Simcity 2000 for OS/2 and some other game vendors.  But indeed this was to little at to late.

With people getting Windows 95 at home according to one analysis I read a few years ago. People at large companies started to complain why they should use OS/2 at work if they had Windows at home...

As for the driver support that is true. What I think what has also not helped is that CD drives had different standards. Not all CD ROM's where supported by OS/2. With Windows 95 you could load a DOS device driver. Making it easier....

Roderick

--- End quote ---

Another issue pointed in the article finds me on the same track; the ISV / IBM relationship.
As I read before, IBM at the time was relying on the old principe "Build it and they will come" - we all saw that until Warp 3 the ISV contribution was minimal. This is also because OS/2 2.1 was so good at running DOS and Win 3 software that many users didn't really feel the need to jump on the WPS paradigm, but this also delayed the birth of horizontal OS/2 native applications IMHO.

When Warp 3 was born, IBM started to hear users complaining about games and more native software, and that was good, but a little too late I'm afraid. The Microsoft win32 wagon was about to crash the market (pretty much playing dirty) and IBM started porting Warp 3 on PPC - this also contributed to our problems. Still, OS/2 got some fairly good vertical application, from Eagle (CAD / CAE) to games like simcity 2000 and office apps like Staroffice, but alas, yes - a little too late.

Mentore

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