The windows compatibility was much touted but it was never impactful enough to compel any significant numbers of DOS/Win users to switch, so it's not like that

The windows compatibility was much touted but it was never impactful enough to compel any significant numbers of DOS/Win users to switch, so it's not like that feature ceasing to work with the arrival of Windows 95 resulted in masses of OS/2 users switching back. There simply never were masses of users. What IBM needed was some killer OS/2-specific programs to attract the masses. There was a window (har har) of time where they probably could have done it, but they missed it. They certainly had the resources at the time. It's also important to remember that PC hardware support was an absolute nightmare back then. OS/2 needed drivers written for everything, and very little was standardized, there wasn't even USB. Hardware compatibility combined with a lack of attractive native software were the major barriers to mass adoption IMHO. edit: This stroll down memory lane just reminded me of the pile of 30+ 3.5" floppy disks required to install OS/2, which I had to write myself using the CDROM from DOS, because OS/2 couldn't use that particular CDROM successfully yet.