Just read a blog post by Charlie Cooper at CNet about OS/2.

Good to see the ostriches bring their heads out of the sand and forget that some of the seeds for OS/2's eventual descent into irrelevancy were sown by, guess who? Yes! IBM !

Remember restrictive OEM contracts? Remember MicroChannel Architecture? Remember optimization for IBM hardware?

Now, Charlie and his readers would like to place the blame on upper management at IBM. Rightly so. Why upper management? They still lived in the past, basking in the long-gone glow of a bygone era, where "You could never get fired for buying IBM". Sadly they had no foresight.

They overestimated the value of the IBM brand in the PC space.

Would Gerstner have fought the same battle? Sure he would have; but unlike the others, he, Gerstner, would have hit the eject button as soon as the product seemed to require life-support!

You see, Gerstner had his sights on a more important facet of IBM: the share price. He felt (rightly) that he had a fiduciary duty to the owners of IBM (the shareholders), to not fight a losing religious battle. That is what makes a good manager. (We have to include Jim Manzi here as well: he got the best price for Lotus.)

However, no matter how many accolades are bestowed on a product, and, OS/2 was the most celebrated OS ever, from the tech cognoscenti - even in death, you hear about it's excellent (insert word here) feature, if you build it, and the customers do not come, a white elephant you will have.

Furthermore, price it out of reach, and impose stupid hardware constraints, and you have OS/2.