3 ms·

> I used OS/2 and to say that I was annoyed at Microsoft's antics at the time would be a gross understatement. I'm a lot more sympathetic to Microsoft than mos

> I used OS/2 and to say that I was annoyed at Microsoft's antics at the time would be a gross understatement. I'm a lot more sympathetic to Microsoft than most. They used some highly anti-competitive tactics, but their products fit the market well, and the competition suffered from a combination of terrible luck and serious strategic miscues. OS/2's a great example of this. If you bought it in 1987/8, it cost three or four times the price of DOS, had higher system requirements, and gave you no benefits at all without totally new software. Windows 3.0 did well because it was cheaper and worked with the hardware and software that you already had. > It's perplexing that a viable alternative product hasn't emerged in recent decades and I'm not totally convinced that Microsoft's saber-rattling over copyright etc. is the full reason it hasn't. It's an expensive effort, and the ability to fund an effort like that can be inversely proportional to the willingness to take on the risks you mention. > Re OS/2, it would be interesting to know details of the agreement between IBM and Microsoft and what percentage of the code each contributed to the project. If IBM did most of the development then perhaps the MS code could have been stripped out but I'd suspect the reverse was the case. There was enough Microsoft development that IBM was working actively to remove Microsoft code from OS/2 in 1995. The Lan Server Enterprise was a part of that, but there was also Workplace OS, which was a fully IBM effort to rebuild OS/2 into a portable OS on top of Mach. Workplace OS feels a lot in retrospect like a way for IBM to turn OS/2 into something more competitive with Windows NT.

hilbert42 4y ago
"It's an expensive effort, and the ability to fund an effort like that can be inversely proportional to the willingness to take on the risks you mention." I'd say you're right and replicating Windows now would be hellishly expensive but it wouldn't have been so some decades back. After all, ReactOS has essentially proved it's possible. Despite the fact that it's not practicability usable it sort of works in limited circumstances (I periodically test it). Given that it's a smalltime backyard effort but can run MS Office on some hardware demonstrates to me that if serious effort were put into its development it would do most of my needs. The other problem of there not being any other API-compatible OS in competition with Windows is that Microsoft has never fixed the many problematic issues with Windows—as it simply never had to. It's too complex to discuss them here but if MS had had fair competition from another OS then end users would have had a much better run.

hilbert42 4y ago

"It's an expensive effort, and the ability to fund an effort like that can be inversely proportional to the willingness to take on the risks you mention." I'd say you're right and replicating Windows now would be hellishly expensive but it wouldn't have been so some decades back. After all, ReactOS has essentially proved it's possible. Despite the fact that it's not practicability usable it sort of works in limited circumstances (I periodically test it). Given that it's a smalltime backyard effort but can run MS Office on some hardware demonstrates to me that if serious effort were put into its development it would do most of my needs. The other problem of there not being any other API-compatible OS in competition with Windows is that Microsoft has never fixed the many problematic issues with Windows—as it simply never had to. It's too complex to discuss them here but if MS had had fair competition from another OS then end users would have had a much better run.