Windows NT was practically the perfectly timed investment because Microsoft also had the MS-DOS + Windows product to tide over the mass market while Moore’s law

Windows NT was practically the perfectly timed investment because Microsoft also had the MS-DOS + Windows product to tide over the mass market while Moore’s law ensured it would eventually catch up with the much better foundation in NT. Bill Gates deserves credit for having the foresight to hire in 1988 the best people to design an operating system that wouldn’t shine until the hardware of 1998. There’s no way NT “almost killed Microsoft” because Windows 3.x was a money printer. And if that hadn’t happened, Microsoft wouldn’t have exited the OS/2 relationship. Windows NT was originally meant to be OS/2 3.0. In the worst-case scenario they could have stuck with that plan and played the role IBM had designed for them, which would also have been lucrative (although nothing like the bonanza of the desktop monopoly they had by the late 1990s).