IBM's OS/2 was technically better than Windows — and it lost anyway

OS/2 was an operating system co-developed by IBM and Microsoft in the late 1980s, intended to succeed DOS. Technically, OS/2 was superior to Windows: it had preemptive multitasking, better memory management and a more robust architecture. IBM bet its PC future on OS/2.

But Microsoft bet on Windows. When Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 succeeded, Microsoft shifted its resources away from OS/2 and toward Windows. IBM was left to market OS/2 alone, and it lacked Microsoft's developer ecosystem, marketing budget and OEM relationships.

OS/2 Warp, released in 1994, was well-reviewed but could not overcome Windows' momentum. Developers wrote for Windows because that's where the users were; users bought Windows because that's where the software was. IBM officially stopped supporting OS/2 in 2006. The case illustrated how a technically superior product can lose to an inferior one with a better ecosystem, and how a partnership can become a death sentence when your partner decides to compete.