Lotus had a close working relationship with IBM (and was eventually bought by IBM) and IBM is as much or more to blame for "OS/2 is the future" than Microsoft.

Lotus had a close working relationship with IBM (and was eventually bought by IBM) and IBM is as much or more to blame for "OS/2 is the future" than Microsoft. People were aware that Microsoft and IBM were starting to disagree on OS/2 as early as 1990 and Microsoft released Win32s, the first preview of Win32 APIs running in Windows 3.1, in 1993 (when OS/2 released the first obviously "post-breakup" OS/2 2.1 and Microsoft also released the first version of Windows NT [3.1] to truly signify the breakup). The writing was on the wall in advance of 1995 and companies like Lotus had a couple years of opportunity to build Win32 applications in advance of Windows 95. It seems hard to call it a bait and switch when the writing was on the wall as early as 1990 that Microsoft wasn't confident in OS/2.