XMan said:
Most of us had issues getting OS/2 to do anything valuable at all
Until WinNT4 came along it was far superior to any server OS
MicroSoft had to offer. If you were coming from a Windows
background it might have seemed a little trickier to configure,
but once it was up and running it was easier to maintain, had
much better security, and had better user/server management
capabilities. IBM had been in the business of making server
OSes for a long time before MicroSoft joined the game - IBM
has been running for years while MicroSoft is still learning
to crawl.
Until Win98SE it was also a far better desktop OS. Not, perhaps,
for a non-techie home user, but certainly for businesses.
But then again, I still remember all the people I helped with
installing and configuring Win 2.x and 3.x on their home systems -
Windows at that time was also far from idiot proof also.
Heck, even today non-techie home users need lots of help with
modern Windows variants.
If IBM had chosen to keep OS/2 up-to-date, such as making it
capable of dealing with modern hardware, it would still
be far superior to anything MicroSoft has to offer.
Unfortunately MicroSoft won the race to the GUI-based OS market
when they pre-empted IBM with the release of Windows and they've
had the momentum ever since. App developers followed MicroSoft
and eventually IBM decided to let OS/2 wither on the vine.
And even though IBM took a little too long to bring OS/2 to
market, they still could have repaired a lot of the damage
if they had done a half decent job of marketing it.
Instead they chose to price it a 3 times the price of Windows,
did minimal advertising, and instead of demonstrating just
how much better it was than Windows they decided to try to
coast on the strength of the IBM name. By the time they
started to make a decent marketing effort it was far too late.