1/ IBM’s OS/2 vs Microsoft's Windows was an important period in the history of PCs and computing. People who were not around then too often have a false view of what happened (e.g. MSFT head fake) and even people who were there can have different recollections (Rashomon effects).
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This looks quite a bit like Microsoft’s take. Having been there as a customer and an IBM employee (admittedly without any sort of inside access), I remember things differently
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OS/2 1.x sucked, but 2.x and 3.0/Warp were much, much better products than Windows at that time. In fact (after I’d left IBM), I used it to build Windows apps because it was a vastly superior environment
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But IBM was a complete disaster in marketing to end users, at which MS excelled. The better product didn’t stand a chance.
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Gates: "I remember change request #221: “Remove fonts from product. Reason: Enhancement to product’s substance. Someone at IBM didn’t want the PC operating system to offer multiple typefaces because a particular IBM mainframe printer couldn’t handle them.”
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Replying to @trengriffin
I’m sure there were many stupid product decisions like that in OS/2. I also vividly remember the over-engineered disaster that was the drag&drop-based “system object model” UI. Still, until Windows NT came out, Windows was much worse internally

Feb 21, 2019 · 3:21 PM UTC

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Replying to @stilkov
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeni… "Xenix remained Microsoft's main development and internal use system until Windows NT was released in the early 90's"
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