I absolutely loved OS/2. It was an absolutely phenomenal operating system. I really wish that IBM had put more effort behind it. Today, if MS and IBM could actually cooperate with one another, it'd be great to get it open sourced.
Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
I wish I could find it but there was a article written by someone who I think had some connection to sales about how OS/2 was effectively "sold wrong" by IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2.
I remember posting that article on a company intranet once and a bunch of former IBM sales folks (who now worked at the same company I did) chimed in to echo the idea that IBM had a neat product with OS/2 but as an organization had no idea what to do with it.
Not to say it would have overtaken Windows, but it also struggled because it was sold by a company who didn't know what to do with it.
I remember in the warp days they were throwing free cdroms at anyone who asked, full licensed. I got several at trade shows. They were trying to sell it for sure.
No marketing campaign or OEM sales strategy would have saved OS/2.
All the things that made it better than Windows 3.0/3.1 also meant it was totally unsuited to fill the disruptive low-end of the PC market that ate Windows up.
The resulting Microsoft platform dominance led to ecosystem dominance led to software library dominance and that was the ballgame.
"IBM who just didn't seem to know how to sell software like OS/2"
Clearly, IBM was never that great at marketing much of anything IMO. However, many at the time also believed that in addition to not being that good at marketing, IBM (collectively) wasn't really overly interested in marketing OS/2.
My understanding is that by Windows 95, IBM's PC division preferred to sell computers with Windows to OS/2.
Yeah it would have been amazing to not have MS as the dominant desktop OS vendor in the world.
But Warp in particular was just sooooo heavy. I used it in the day, I even got a free cdrom somewhere. But it was just terribly sluggish. And I was a computer science student so I already had more resources than most. They really screwed that up so bad.
They should have called it OS/2 Wait
That's not my recollection of OS/2 3.0... It was snappy on contemporary hardware and 16MB memory.
But OS/2 was always sensitive to available RAM, and IBM liked to understate its memory requirements. (They pretended that OS/2 2.0 could run on 4MB because they had promised it years earlier. But it was really unusable on only four megs.) Maybe that was the issue?
I don't remember how much I had, but I think the "contemporary" is the issue. It really needed up to date hardware and most people didn't spend a lot on computers in those days so it would usually have been a year or some old.
And yeah I'm sure I didn't have a ton of ram, I don't remember how much though. I was only a poor student (but as a computer science student I already had a lot more than most people I knew).
But if someone just went home with a CDROM and installed it, it usually would not end well, this was part of the problem. I knew some enthusiasts that loved it but they did invest specifically to run it. That's just not great for an OS that still has to prove itself.