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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

What could have been. If the respective parties had just gotten their acts together on the PPC 615, OS/2, WordPerfect, and Lotus.

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> What could have been. If the respective parties... on the PPC 615, OS/2

There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all:

"The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."

Was there any act that would have overcome the synergy of Intel’s commodity hardware economics and Microsoft’s ecosystem dominance?

Yes, getting stuff together and getting it out there.

Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.

Hey give Windows 3.11 FOR WORKGROUPS some respect ;)

Being at the right age when Windows 95 came out, I didn't really know that there was a "Windows" prior to 95. My dad's computer ran DOS and used something called Powermenu as an organiser for executing programs. I think I had to run Wolfenstein in a tiny window for it to be fast enough to be playable, and may have, at one point, deleted one of the required DOS system files in order to try to tweak the life out of it to try to get it playable full screen. I think that was a 286. More years ago than I care to admit.

Additionally, while this is US-centric, there were still many households in the mid-1990s whose first computers were PCs running Windows 95, just in time for the World Wide Web to be widely available, which created demand for personal computers. Additionally, this was during the time when Apple was struggling; its Performa lineup geared toward home users was not in the best of shape in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC). By the time Steve Jobs returned and Apple released the first iMac (1998), it was just about time for Windows 98.

What numbers? As much as I hated Windows 3.x (which is why I upgraded from DOS to Linux, not to Windows 95, and never looked back) it did not occur to me that many by 1995 did not have some Windows 3.x installed, as it was required for so much software (even some games).

Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in the first three months, Windows 95 moved ten million copies in the first year.

Everyone I knew went from either no PC at all, or an older DOS 386-era machine to a Windows 95 computer.

3M copies in 3 months is more than 10M in a year (if you assume sustained sales).

I don't get what the numbers are supposed to imply.

Windows 3.1: ~3 million in first six weeks, ~>3 million in first three months, ~25 million in first year.

Windows 95: ~1 million in first 4 days, ~7 million in first five weeks, ~40 million in first year.

These figures represent Microsoft’s own sales figures.

Yeah those don't match parent's comment.

Still don't support the claim that people were mainly updating from DOS without Windows 3.x. Anecdotally I still think almost everyone using DOS by 1995 had Windows 3.x installed as well. Not necessarily a copy of Windows that was the result of Microsoft selling a copy of course.

One of the big reasons people were upgrading to OS/2 was people that wanted a stabler/cleaner Windows 3.1. Most of the hottest apps for OS/2 were Windows apps. IBM started on the back foot in that competition. Windows 95 clipped their heels because it had the stability/cleanliness for cheaper and less of a RAM footprint.

What numbers do you have in mind?

I was paying very close attention to this world at the time, and I am confident that 90%+ of every PC that could run Win95 at the time of its release had been sold by an OEM as booting straight into the bundled copy of Win3.1.

Yes, lots of people had older PCs and got Win95 with their hardware upgrade cycle.

They were never in any danger of upgrading to OS/2 or anything else: Microsoft owned the OEM sales channel and the software ecosystem for the PC for a solid 5+ years before Windows 95.

Apple somehow managed to claw it's way to releavance from a weaker position in 1998 (with PoserPC!) So if they had their act together they could have done better in the early 90s.

hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market.

Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market.

But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.

I remember working with a guy who was the internal IBM rep (we were in corporate tech support in the late 1990’s and we were a BIG IBM reseller, so my friend got lots of bennies at work) and he had a PPC 605 (not the 615 IIRC), but he ran AIX on it (we were in the AIX and Unix support team).

Man I was jealous!

‘SteveB went on the road to see the top weeklies, industry analysts and business press this week to give our systems strategy. The meetings included demos of Windows 3.1 (pen and multimedia included), Windows NT, OS/2 2.0 including a performance comparison to Windows and a “bad app” that corrupted other applications and crashed the system. It was a very valuable trip and needs to be repeated by other MS executives throughout the next month so we hit all the publications and analysts.’

‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’

"I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)."

http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf

DOS ain’t done ‘till Lotus won’t run.

Great links!

I don’t see how SteveB’s “bad app” was out of bounds. IBM was telling these analysts a bad app couldn’t bring down OS/2. As someone who used (and liked!) OS/2 at the time, this was indeed false: IIRC OS/2 in this era had a single-threaded UI loop, and a misbehaving app could (and occasionally did) block input for all apps and corrupt the UI.

You could argue about the difference between this and a Windows “UAE”, but to the user the experience was a broken, unusable OS/2.

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