Re: OS/2: the expensive flop
I disagree on all 3 points.
> MS who were always (cough! cough!) fleet of foot intended to milk everything they could out of the IBM connection then go off on their own.
Your cynicism is right. But MS really believed in OS/2 and invested a lot of the effort that was salvageable: e.g. the UI.
IBM bollocksed it up. MS got out and did something cheap, quick and dirty which delivered the bit people wanted.
Back then it was agile enough to pull this off. Now, I doubt it.
> It was their own fault because IBM viewed OS/2 as only “one of [their] operating systems” and their PC division wanted to sell as many boxen as possible which by that time meant Windows.
Only kinda sorta. IBM was too fixated on servicing the customers it had already sold to. MS looked to the future. That's usually the right move.
More generally, it is what biologists call r versus K strategy.
r: have millions of babies. The vast majority will die. Accept it, move on. The survivors will win out on numbers.
K strategy: have only a very few babies but look after them, nurture them, so they have the best chance.
Neither is "correct". Both work. Both work *in the same ecosystem*.
IBM wanted smaller numbers of high value high margin customers.
MS saw that victory lies in piling 'em high and selling 'em cheap.
MS was right. This time, in the PC industry.
> Even though (I think it was Eric Raymond who wrote) W95 was “shockingly inferior” to OS/2 Warp.
Nah it wasn't.
I bought OS/2 2.0 with my own money. And 2.1 but I didn't use it.
I loved OS/2. In 1992 or '93 it was _much_ better than Win3.
But the WPS was weird clunky junk. The multitasking blocked on user I/O. The drivers were few and poor. The installer was a nightmare pile of poo. The fancy filesystem didn't even shorten filenames for DOS. Fractint reliably crashed it.
Nah. Win95 was better in the ways that mattered.
The multitasking was good enough. It had long filenames that worked, even for DOS. Screw extended attributes and that BS. It ran on almost anything. The UI was a decade better than WPS.
Today, every Linux apes Win95. There is no modern version of WPS except on OS/2 itself, on ArcaOS.
Win95 ran on whatever you had, and it ran whatever software you had. It was slutty in the good way: it fitted in, it cooperated, it wasn't fussy and didn't discriminate. The basic cheap version did networking and _good_ networking.
In every important way, Win95 was better, and it deserved to win.
I deserted from OS/2 2.1 where most of my kit from OS/2 2.0 didn't work any more. My SVGA graphics didn't work. My parallel-port sound card with its paid-for 2.0 driver didn't work. My fancy mouse with a numeric keypad on it, with a driver ordered from the USA on floppy for more than the price of a cheapo mouse, no longer worked with a 0.1 version update.
Sod that. Win95 beta 4 or so did everything, it was as fast, it looked better, worked better, ran more, and used all my hardware.