Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
"A better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows", and an SDK for line of business corporate apps.
No effort to market to end users.
That is exactly what DesqView (and TopDesk) among others, offered.
They may not have realized it but a system integration tool is what they were marketting. And I'm not making that up; that was the consensus post-mortem on OS/2 in the late 90's. And I heard that very phrase from our IBM rep when we bought our first-gen RS/6000s.
MS targetted the needs of end users and IBM targetted the desires of the glass house gang. Unfortunately for them, in the real world needs trump desires, even those of gatekeepers.
We're seeing a replay in trade publishing right now.
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One of my assignments during my career in IBM was as an OS/2 developer. My group worked with the marketing teams and Microsoft liaisons from the late 80's to the mid-90's. I was intimately involved in what went down.
OS/2 was not originally intended to be an end-user OS. It was only after an unfortunate series of interactions with Microsoft that caused us to shift the focus, but by that time too much valuable time was lost. But OS/2 was extremely successful for it's primary target... mission critical business. So much so that virtually all of the banking systems ATMs ran OS/2 at one point in time... there are quite a few that still do and OS/2 continues to be supported (albiet by a much smaller company)
If the lesson you take away from the OS/2 story is that "IBM targeted the desires of the glass house gang vs MS' targeting end user needs" then you learned the wrong lesson.