So in the end we all won, just Dec had to die.
But DEC only saw Altavista as a toy, something for showing off big systems, or doing personal desktop search. The missed such incredible opportunity.
OS/2 was a reasonable good OS and a history based on OS/2 rather then Windows 95 and friends seems to be a pretty good path forward.
And OS/2 being Microsoft and IBM would have made Microsoft not quite as powerful and dominate.
> The missed such incredible opportunity.
DEC was sold for around 10 billion, just a few years later Altavista alone was sold for around 2 billion.
And Altavista was valued basically 0 in the Compaq acquisition. Compaq seem to really only value the Services division, everything else they didn't care about.