There were a few issues: 1) Running X and DOS applications was an interesting concept in a world (i.e. x86 PCs) where no standard GUI had yet dominated. The c

There were a few issues: 1) Running X and DOS applications was an interesting concept in a world (i.e. x86 PCs) where no standard GUI had yet dominated. The concept that Quarterdeck was likely banking on was that DOS apps would continue to be the standard on the PC with more 'enterprisey' applications running on big iron Unix systems for corporations/government/education. Unfortunately for Quarterdeck, this didn't happen the way they thought/hoped it would as X never really got traction beyond the workstation market until Linux took off. As we all know now, the way most users ended up interacting with Unix/Linux systems is via a web browser... no X required. 2) This was right around the time Windows was starting to take off. While Windows didn't do nearly as good a job at multitasking DOS applications (i.e. it didn't provide them as much conventional memory and the task switching was quite chunky) it provided enough of a stop-gap solution while Microsoft pushed what would become MS Office hard. So within about a year of it being released, the question was transitioning from 'will it run my DOS applications' to 'will it run my Windows applications' for many. On the X side, by 1994 Linux had both X (client and server) support and a networking stack, performed better and was free. So both sides of the value proposition (multitasking DOS apps and being an X server) were rendered moot. 3) Unlike other desktop OS's, DESQView/X didn't have many 'native' applications since very little software was ever ported to run client-side. So for the majority of users who didn't need to run X applications across a network, it was really just a DOS multitasker with a nice (for its time) GUI.