OS / 2 Death: Killing or Self-Shot?
My first article on OS / 2 basically consisted of an apology for my personal contribution to the failure of OS / 2. But I can't put all the blame on myself. Honestly, the failure of OS / 2 had thousands of reasons, with the vast majority of which I could not help it. Here are some of them.
A long time ago, IBM was making crazy money on large hardware — mainframes so large that one of the German universities was heated by the cooling system of the Blue Giant computer.
Even “minicomputers” often occupied a whole room, which gave IBM complete control over customers. Organizations simply accepted as given the fact that providing serious computing power required a serious amount of money. IBM knew that it could ask as much money as it wanted - and did it. Personal computers did not fit into this model.
')
The era of IBM, in which machines, printers, drives, people, cats and dogs lived together.
IBM's big hardware was under threat: advanced PCs were undermining the Blue Giant in the form of servers. The mega vendor decided to respond to this by turning its own PCs into minicomputers and mainframes. This required a new operating system. DOS had to go.
Microsoft, which developed OS / 2 together with IBM, really liked the idea of ​​moving to the upper market segments, because at that time its influence was limited to desktop computers, and Bill Gates did not lie, calling Windows and DOS steps on the way to OS / 2. This knocked out competing DR-DOS and UNIX from the game.
So what happened to the OS / 2 servers?
At that time, x86 servers attracted much more attention than IBM System / 36 and 38 minicomputers and even AS / 400 , which came out around the same time as OS / 2 in the late 1980s.
You could add RAM and disks to your Intel-based system integrator, and there was not a single reason to buy it from IBM, run IBM programs on it, or pay IBM employees for its repair and integration with other systems. It may seem that this is not only good, but inevitable. But if you own 85% of an extremely profitable market, you will not see anything good in this inevitability.
Countless firms used IBM software on IBM machines linked through IBM SNA to IBM printers using IBM paper. Only a complete fool could risk such an influence, but IBM still began to lose control over the initially disruptive and diverse PC world.
When creating IBM personal computers, it never occurred to me to somehow connect them with other systems of our own production. For a very long time, this had to use third-party hardware and programs. IBM was shaking over every penny of revenue lost from the PC, but noticed that every PC connected to the mainframe became a terminal and increased the load on the processors of a large machine. This meant that customers would have to upgrade their mainframes. As a rule of thumb, each terminal increased sales of mainframes by about half a MIP.
I'm not quite sure about the accuracy of this data, but they were taken into account when the decision was made not to add network capabilities to the PC. The influence of IBM was so great that any of its actions was considered wise. It goes without saying that Unix and VMS were, but many buyers were frightened by the fact that they were not made by IBM.
The release of IBM x86 servers inevitably entailed a shift in high profits from mainframes to low ones from PCs. Among other things, this meant that although OS / 2 could have been a first-class server system, this super force hid until it was too late, and the prices for IBM x86 servers were greatly inflated.
Employees of the IBM PC-department understood the prospects of the servers, but as a tactical maneuver they commissioned the development of OS / 2 version for Microsoft servers. In this way, they tried to avoid the anger of those IBM divisions that earned serious money, unlike the proud, but low-profit, PC department.
It is unlikely that they could make any other decision, at least while IBM was led by “business people,” the main feature is a fundamental unwillingness to understand their own products, turning into aggression if someone tries to start a serious conversation about it. The competitors were led by people who personally participated in the development of their technologies, hardly anyone would call Bill Gates a brilliant programmer, but he started by writing code, rather than building a career in the accounting department. In this regard, he was significantly superior to the IBM manual.
Red sign of death
As I said in the first part, in the late 1980s I worked in a temporary agreement at IBM, catching errors in OS / 2.
Of course, a lot of time passed from that moment, but the paragraph below is what I remembered from the inscription on the blood-red sticker that the obstinate IBM security staff left on your desk if during the night check they found that you forgot something deemed by them to be particularly secret
With this sign I mark you as a sinner. For you are a sinner. Yes, the sinner is in the eyes of God and in the eyes of man, who has sinned in the depths of his heart. My eyes hurt by the sight of your sin. Leave these fertile lands and go into the possession of the lawlessness master, where all your sins will become clear to you.
Or something like that doesn't matter. Since the security clerks did not know how to read diskettes, they considered any of them filled with secret information and carried off to a safe place, after which you had to humiliate apologize to return your diskettes. Then they turned the knife in the wound, reducing the estimated points for you and your boss.
We are talking to you in private, so don't unlock it, it would be nice to get such a sticker, wouldn't you?
So did the maykrosoftovtsy, starting to work together with IBM or, depending on your point of view, against it. After one of them received a sticker, leaving a programming manual on the table, each of them wanted to get the same one to take home and show to friends.
Wow, look! Crazy OS / 2!
Do not forget, at that time Microsoft was not the current dinosaur. She was a cocky, small mammal, eating the eggs of the then dinosaurs. At that time, the Redmond bosses used their own products without complaining that it takes time to play golf. Yes, it was a long time ago.
At that time, I was working on solving IT-related problems in third-party firms and my own clients were extremely sensitive to the need to give access to their systems. In the same way, IBM applied to Microsoft, despite the fact that OS / 2 was considered a joint project.
IBM directly denied Microsoft access to its network, so the decision made by Microsoft was the most reasonable, although it lowered the productivity of work. Microsoft built their own network using cables purchased at a nearby store. There they bought their PC.
We all happened to “enjoy” waiting for a new job and issuing a computer, but if you are the largest IT company on the planet and your most important project is delayed, then it may be worth making sure that your partner’s developers will get working computers on time?
When the best Microsoft developers arrived in London, it was easier for them to buy their own computers. They preferred Compaq machines. Unfortunately, the IBM PS / 2, specifically designed for OS / 2, was not fully compatible with Compaq computers and, quite possibly, with Microsoft employee code. American employees Microsoft had to beat out PS / 2 from IBM for a long time in order to test their code.
Where was the database?
At that time, IBM’s influence on the database market was so great that many IT professionals could not recall a single competitor and eventually still pronounced the name of some IBM product.
In the end, Blue Giant reluctantly released an “Extended Edition” OS / 2, capable of connecting to IBM databases, but to put it mildly, to put it mildly. I didn’t see such a bad performance until I started using Lotus Notes. Of course, no one considered this to be part of the highly respected family of IBM database management systems.
The databases brought IBM more money than the entire PC unit taken together, so management blocked all attempts to make the database for the PC friendlier than the cornered rat. I do not know who exactly wrote it, but I know for sure that he has never been to England, because he is still alive - because I had to write code with its use and it was a real nightmare.
Decades later, RIM made a similar mistake: it developed a tablet, purposefully deprived of the ability to work with e-mail, the convenience of which was famous for their smartphones. It did not lead to anything good. Theoretically, RIM "did not want to confuse customers," but in fact the leadership of the smartphone team was simply much more influential than the newcomers from the tablet team.
Sign it, here it says: "Never again talk to our programmers."
At some point, many realized that distributing computers with DOS and Windows was cheaper than just using DOS, so Microsoft actually paid extra for Windows. IBM employees were not particularly encouraged to sell OS / 2, but at one of the presentations I was caught by a guy who worked with the largest client from the banking sector, and offered to commit an act for which we would both be fired.
He wanted to talk to one of the developers of the operating system.
Most likely, he signed a commitment not to communicate with people directly involved in the development of the most important IBM software product. His own computer was too weak for OS / 2, but his dedication to IBM was much stronger than she deserved, and he really wanted to sell OS / 2.
Now I am teaching bankers in financial programming, but at that time I knew almost nothing about the economic side of software development. Like IBM.
The OS / 2 price was obtained by dividing the development cost by the expected sales and adding the expected profit - this meant hundreds and hundreds of dollars. A bold decision on the background of Microsoft, paying people for installing Windows. OS / 2 also required a few additional megabytes of memory, which at that time cost a lot, but the worst thing was the fact that the system was only pre-installed on its computers by the rapidly losing IBM market share.
By that time, Microsoft was experiencing ambivalent feelings about OS / 2, and IBM did not want to install its programs on other people's computers, so no effort was made to convince other computer manufacturers to preinstall OS / 2 on their machines. Installing OS / 2 was fairly simple, but no one guaranteed that it would work on your hardware, and the price under a thousand dollars made such an experiment extremely expensive.
I have never worked on the London Stock Exchange, which sounds strange to those people who saw me sitting at their computers - but at its main terminal, Topic 2, it was planned to use OS / 2. I offered myself as technical support, since IBM did not help projects on OS / 2 if they were not part of the mainframe, and this one was not.
The ban on OS / 2 support was valid even for the most important IBM customers. An IBM representative who works with a client who was more profitable than the American government at that time received the support he needed only if he risked his work by directly communicating with people from the development team who understood that he was critical to the success of our project.
I received indignant letters from the authorities after responding to pleas for help from the technical support service, and in the end it was one of the reasons why they decided not to renew my contract.
Listen to your customers
One stupid mistake killed OS / 2. It is called OS / 2 1.3 (*). At that time, a 32-bit version that could run multiple copies of Windows with all applications was almost ready - a terrible proposal, in fact, everything that you received in Windows NT, but better two years earlier.
Downloading dynamic link libraries in versions 1.0 and 1.1 did not work very well, but some genius came up with a very fast way for 1.3. In addition to this, there were a lot of minor fixes and improvements.
But some customers told IBM that they want to speed up version 1.1 and reduce memory consumption. The development of a cool new version was stopped and we killed months for this meaningless piece of shit.
By this time, my contract expired and I went traveling around the world, working on OS / 2 support in banks and other organizations and at the same time, just for my own pleasure, I tried to repair some of the damage caused by the IBM PR department. Among other things, I installed OS / 2 in Windows Magazine. IBM explicitly refused to provide the magazine with at least one copy, despite the fact that it would have become the main topic of the next issue and got on the cover - at that time Microsoft was very angry with their editor.
Drivers, drivers everywhere, but no information about them
As a more or less competent PC Magazine test department chief, I suddenly found myself trying to run this damn system on a random hardware found in the editorial for a large-scale comparison of OS / 2 and Windows. In those days, PC Magazine was a very influential publication, so it really mattered. Windows earned almost all hardware, while OS / 2 was launched on very few machines and only after a serious effort was made.
This situation was not accidental. IBM actively discouraged writing drivers for OS / 2. The “exemplary” drivers were deeply flawed, I attended the meeting, where the professionalism of one of the IBM employees overcame his desire to save work and he directly refused to release them due to the extremely low quality. He was ordered to do this.
Download process - we pray that it will go further on our PC
I am an OS / 2 developer who later retrained to Windows, so the tests I wrote could not be more honest about OS / 2. In fact, I knew some poorly documented interfaces that helped work faster with graphics, although it was not very nice.
The main artist called the screenshots of the interface of my tests "the ugliest thing he had ever seen on a computer screen." But my tricks did not work on most PCs, application developers massively switched to Windows - and with a heavy stone in my heart, I voted for Windows as Editor's Choice.
IBM's PR department, which I never liked, was extremely cold after that, but didn’t do anything more serious simply because he already did everything he could to ruin my life.
IBM, in principle, did not deal with public relations, because of the general culture of secrecy, they treated the IT press about the same way as the royal family did to the paparazzi. When I joined PC Magazine, a blue letter was sent all over the Blue Giant, forbidding people to communicate with “a journalist who could work with you and whom you could know personally.” I know this because I didn’t even know how many friends I had at IBM until each of them sent me this letter. Many IBM employees attended my wedding, including my best friend and former intern, my bride.
For most of us, the battles were not only between Microsoft and IBM. Very often they occurred between technical staff and superiors who repeated the mantra “we are not a computer company, we are a business” so often that in just a few years IBM suffered the largest annual losses that one company has ever suffered in its entire history, since "Business people" could not do anything that you would like to buy.
It was scary to look at the deliberate neglect of product quality in order to reduce costs. Another mantra was “every dollar saved on the cost of a PC brings millions” - posters with it were hung all over the building.
Results
Millions of copies of OS / 2 were sold, entire firms and a significant portion of cash registers around the world worked on it, so I can assume that the system eventually made a profit. She still lives under the name of eComStation .
The project absorbed funds that could go to other products and help IBM to keep its leading position longer. He also shattered the incredibly valuable belief that "no one has yet been laid off for buying IBM products."
Now IBM develops far fewer products, often buying “mature” firms and monetizing their products with the help of monetary engineering. Of course she is one of the largest consulting firms (body shops).
Dominic Connor, still a member of the OS / 2 London Amateur Club (Drinking Group)
Notes:
* Why wasn't it called OS / 3? When choosing the name OS / 2, no one checked the availability of the name OS / 3 - this trademark belonged to Unisys and you are unlikely to expect such an error from a serious marketing department, would you?
Marketing in EMEA was under the control of the French, who blocked the release of the system in the UK before the release of the "European" assembly in French, the delay cost us real sales.
The development of the French version was more complicated than you might think, since the markup of all windows was hard-coded in .RC files. , , . , , .
Where were the bullet holes on OS/2's corpse? Its head… or foot?
IBM employee recollections: how I found my wife, catching bugs in OS / 2
OS/2 : IBM , Microsoft
A long time ago, IBM was making crazy money on large hardware — mainframes so large that one of the German universities was heated by the cooling system of the Blue Giant computer.
Even “minicomputers” often occupied a whole room, which gave IBM complete control over customers. Organizations simply accepted as given the fact that providing serious computing power required a serious amount of money. IBM knew that it could ask as much money as it wanted - and did it. Personal computers did not fit into this model.
')
The era of IBM, in which machines, printers, drives, people, cats and dogs lived together.
IBM's big hardware was under threat: advanced PCs were undermining the Blue Giant in the form of servers. The mega vendor decided to respond to this by turning its own PCs into minicomputers and mainframes. This required a new operating system. DOS had to go.
Microsoft, which developed OS / 2 together with IBM, really liked the idea of ​​moving to the upper market segments, because at that time its influence was limited to desktop computers, and Bill Gates did not lie, calling Windows and DOS steps on the way to OS / 2. This knocked out competing DR-DOS and UNIX from the game.
So what happened to the OS / 2 servers?
At that time, x86 servers attracted much more attention than IBM System / 36 and 38 minicomputers and even AS / 400 , which came out around the same time as OS / 2 in the late 1980s.
You could add RAM and disks to your Intel-based system integrator, and there was not a single reason to buy it from IBM, run IBM programs on it, or pay IBM employees for its repair and integration with other systems. It may seem that this is not only good, but inevitable. But if you own 85% of an extremely profitable market, you will not see anything good in this inevitability.
Countless firms used IBM software on IBM machines linked through IBM SNA to IBM printers using IBM paper. Only a complete fool could risk such an influence, but IBM still began to lose control over the initially disruptive and diverse PC world.
When creating IBM personal computers, it never occurred to me to somehow connect them with other systems of our own production. For a very long time, this had to use third-party hardware and programs. IBM was shaking over every penny of revenue lost from the PC, but noticed that every PC connected to the mainframe became a terminal and increased the load on the processors of a large machine. This meant that customers would have to upgrade their mainframes. As a rule of thumb, each terminal increased sales of mainframes by about half a MIP.
I'm not quite sure about the accuracy of this data, but they were taken into account when the decision was made not to add network capabilities to the PC. The influence of IBM was so great that any of its actions was considered wise. It goes without saying that Unix and VMS were, but many buyers were frightened by the fact that they were not made by IBM.
The release of IBM x86 servers inevitably entailed a shift in high profits from mainframes to low ones from PCs. Among other things, this meant that although OS / 2 could have been a first-class server system, this super force hid until it was too late, and the prices for IBM x86 servers were greatly inflated.
Employees of the IBM PC-department understood the prospects of the servers, but as a tactical maneuver they commissioned the development of OS / 2 version for Microsoft servers. In this way, they tried to avoid the anger of those IBM divisions that earned serious money, unlike the proud, but low-profit, PC department.
It is unlikely that they could make any other decision, at least while IBM was led by “business people,” the main feature is a fundamental unwillingness to understand their own products, turning into aggression if someone tries to start a serious conversation about it. The competitors were led by people who personally participated in the development of their technologies, hardly anyone would call Bill Gates a brilliant programmer, but he started by writing code, rather than building a career in the accounting department. In this regard, he was significantly superior to the IBM manual.
Red sign of death
As I said in the first part, in the late 1980s I worked in a temporary agreement at IBM, catching errors in OS / 2.
Of course, a lot of time passed from that moment, but the paragraph below is what I remembered from the inscription on the blood-red sticker that the obstinate IBM security staff left on your desk if during the night check they found that you forgot something deemed by them to be particularly secret
With this sign I mark you as a sinner. For you are a sinner. Yes, the sinner is in the eyes of God and in the eyes of man, who has sinned in the depths of his heart. My eyes hurt by the sight of your sin. Leave these fertile lands and go into the possession of the lawlessness master, where all your sins will become clear to you.
Or something like that doesn't matter. Since the security clerks did not know how to read diskettes, they considered any of them filled with secret information and carried off to a safe place, after which you had to humiliate apologize to return your diskettes. Then they turned the knife in the wound, reducing the estimated points for you and your boss.
We are talking to you in private, so don't unlock it, it would be nice to get such a sticker, wouldn't you?
So did the maykrosoftovtsy, starting to work together with IBM or, depending on your point of view, against it. After one of them received a sticker, leaving a programming manual on the table, each of them wanted to get the same one to take home and show to friends.
Wow, look! Crazy OS / 2!
Do not forget, at that time Microsoft was not the current dinosaur. She was a cocky, small mammal, eating the eggs of the then dinosaurs. At that time, the Redmond bosses used their own products without complaining that it takes time to play golf. Yes, it was a long time ago.
At that time, I was working on solving IT-related problems in third-party firms and my own clients were extremely sensitive to the need to give access to their systems. In the same way, IBM applied to Microsoft, despite the fact that OS / 2 was considered a joint project.
IBM directly denied Microsoft access to its network, so the decision made by Microsoft was the most reasonable, although it lowered the productivity of work. Microsoft built their own network using cables purchased at a nearby store. There they bought their PC.
We all happened to “enjoy” waiting for a new job and issuing a computer, but if you are the largest IT company on the planet and your most important project is delayed, then it may be worth making sure that your partner’s developers will get working computers on time?
When the best Microsoft developers arrived in London, it was easier for them to buy their own computers. They preferred Compaq machines. Unfortunately, the IBM PS / 2, specifically designed for OS / 2, was not fully compatible with Compaq computers and, quite possibly, with Microsoft employee code. American employees Microsoft had to beat out PS / 2 from IBM for a long time in order to test their code.
Where was the database?
At that time, IBM’s influence on the database market was so great that many IT professionals could not recall a single competitor and eventually still pronounced the name of some IBM product.
In the end, Blue Giant reluctantly released an “Extended Edition” OS / 2, capable of connecting to IBM databases, but to put it mildly, to put it mildly. I didn’t see such a bad performance until I started using Lotus Notes. Of course, no one considered this to be part of the highly respected family of IBM database management systems.
The databases brought IBM more money than the entire PC unit taken together, so management blocked all attempts to make the database for the PC friendlier than the cornered rat. I do not know who exactly wrote it, but I know for sure that he has never been to England, because he is still alive - because I had to write code with its use and it was a real nightmare.
Decades later, RIM made a similar mistake: it developed a tablet, purposefully deprived of the ability to work with e-mail, the convenience of which was famous for their smartphones. It did not lead to anything good. Theoretically, RIM "did not want to confuse customers," but in fact the leadership of the smartphone team was simply much more influential than the newcomers from the tablet team.
Sign it, here it says: "Never again talk to our programmers."
At some point, many realized that distributing computers with DOS and Windows was cheaper than just using DOS, so Microsoft actually paid extra for Windows. IBM employees were not particularly encouraged to sell OS / 2, but at one of the presentations I was caught by a guy who worked with the largest client from the banking sector, and offered to commit an act for which we would both be fired.
He wanted to talk to one of the developers of the operating system.
Most likely, he signed a commitment not to communicate with people directly involved in the development of the most important IBM software product. His own computer was too weak for OS / 2, but his dedication to IBM was much stronger than she deserved, and he really wanted to sell OS / 2.
Now I am teaching bankers in financial programming, but at that time I knew almost nothing about the economic side of software development. Like IBM.
The OS / 2 price was obtained by dividing the development cost by the expected sales and adding the expected profit - this meant hundreds and hundreds of dollars. A bold decision on the background of Microsoft, paying people for installing Windows. OS / 2 also required a few additional megabytes of memory, which at that time cost a lot, but the worst thing was the fact that the system was only pre-installed on its computers by the rapidly losing IBM market share.
By that time, Microsoft was experiencing ambivalent feelings about OS / 2, and IBM did not want to install its programs on other people's computers, so no effort was made to convince other computer manufacturers to preinstall OS / 2 on their machines. Installing OS / 2 was fairly simple, but no one guaranteed that it would work on your hardware, and the price under a thousand dollars made such an experiment extremely expensive.
I have never worked on the London Stock Exchange, which sounds strange to those people who saw me sitting at their computers - but at its main terminal, Topic 2, it was planned to use OS / 2. I offered myself as technical support, since IBM did not help projects on OS / 2 if they were not part of the mainframe, and this one was not.
The ban on OS / 2 support was valid even for the most important IBM customers. An IBM representative who works with a client who was more profitable than the American government at that time received the support he needed only if he risked his work by directly communicating with people from the development team who understood that he was critical to the success of our project.
I received indignant letters from the authorities after responding to pleas for help from the technical support service, and in the end it was one of the reasons why they decided not to renew my contract.
Listen to your customers
One stupid mistake killed OS / 2. It is called OS / 2 1.3 (*). At that time, a 32-bit version that could run multiple copies of Windows with all applications was almost ready - a terrible proposal, in fact, everything that you received in Windows NT, but better two years earlier.
Downloading dynamic link libraries in versions 1.0 and 1.1 did not work very well, but some genius came up with a very fast way for 1.3. In addition to this, there were a lot of minor fixes and improvements.
But some customers told IBM that they want to speed up version 1.1 and reduce memory consumption. The development of a cool new version was stopped and we killed months for this meaningless piece of shit.
By this time, my contract expired and I went traveling around the world, working on OS / 2 support in banks and other organizations and at the same time, just for my own pleasure, I tried to repair some of the damage caused by the IBM PR department. Among other things, I installed OS / 2 in Windows Magazine. IBM explicitly refused to provide the magazine with at least one copy, despite the fact that it would have become the main topic of the next issue and got on the cover - at that time Microsoft was very angry with their editor.
Drivers, drivers everywhere, but no information about them
As a more or less competent PC Magazine test department chief, I suddenly found myself trying to run this damn system on a random hardware found in the editorial for a large-scale comparison of OS / 2 and Windows. In those days, PC Magazine was a very influential publication, so it really mattered. Windows earned almost all hardware, while OS / 2 was launched on very few machines and only after a serious effort was made.
This situation was not accidental. IBM actively discouraged writing drivers for OS / 2. The “exemplary” drivers were deeply flawed, I attended the meeting, where the professionalism of one of the IBM employees overcame his desire to save work and he directly refused to release them due to the extremely low quality. He was ordered to do this.
Download process - we pray that it will go further on our PC
I am an OS / 2 developer who later retrained to Windows, so the tests I wrote could not be more honest about OS / 2. In fact, I knew some poorly documented interfaces that helped work faster with graphics, although it was not very nice.
The main artist called the screenshots of the interface of my tests "the ugliest thing he had ever seen on a computer screen." But my tricks did not work on most PCs, application developers massively switched to Windows - and with a heavy stone in my heart, I voted for Windows as Editor's Choice.
IBM's PR department, which I never liked, was extremely cold after that, but didn’t do anything more serious simply because he already did everything he could to ruin my life.
IBM, in principle, did not deal with public relations, because of the general culture of secrecy, they treated the IT press about the same way as the royal family did to the paparazzi. When I joined PC Magazine, a blue letter was sent all over the Blue Giant, forbidding people to communicate with “a journalist who could work with you and whom you could know personally.” I know this because I didn’t even know how many friends I had at IBM until each of them sent me this letter. Many IBM employees attended my wedding, including my best friend and former intern, my bride.
For most of us, the battles were not only between Microsoft and IBM. Very often they occurred between technical staff and superiors who repeated the mantra “we are not a computer company, we are a business” so often that in just a few years IBM suffered the largest annual losses that one company has ever suffered in its entire history, since "Business people" could not do anything that you would like to buy.
It was scary to look at the deliberate neglect of product quality in order to reduce costs. Another mantra was “every dollar saved on the cost of a PC brings millions” - posters with it were hung all over the building.
Results
Millions of copies of OS / 2 were sold, entire firms and a significant portion of cash registers around the world worked on it, so I can assume that the system eventually made a profit. She still lives under the name of eComStation .
The project absorbed funds that could go to other products and help IBM to keep its leading position longer. He also shattered the incredibly valuable belief that "no one has yet been laid off for buying IBM products."
Now IBM develops far fewer products, often buying “mature” firms and monetizing their products with the help of monetary engineering. Of course she is one of the largest consulting firms (body shops).
Dominic Connor, still a member of the OS / 2 London Amateur Club (Drinking Group)
Notes:
* Why wasn't it called OS / 3? When choosing the name OS / 2, no one checked the availability of the name OS / 3 - this trademark belonged to Unisys and you are unlikely to expect such an error from a serious marketing department, would you?
Marketing in EMEA was under the control of the French, who blocked the release of the system in the UK before the release of the "European" assembly in French, the delay cost us real sales.
The development of the French version was more complicated than you might think, since the markup of all windows was hard-coded in .RC files. , , . , , .
Where were the bullet holes on OS/2's corpse? Its head… or foot?
IBM employee recollections: how I found my wife, catching bugs in OS / 2
OS/2 : IBM , Microsoft
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/192126/
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