Comment by mschaef

> However, when the partnership fell apart, Microsoft just took big chunks of that OS/2 API and created a sub par version and called it the Windows API.

Microsoft learned from the mistakes IBM forced on them and did a better job. Right off the top of my head:

* IBM forced 80286 compatibility in an 80386 world.

* IBM forced incompatibility between Windows and OS/2 for the sake of preserving their mainframe graphics API's.

* OS/2 had a single messaging queue for the whole desktop.

* OS/2 was tied to the underlying hardware to the extent of being written partly in assembler.

OS/2 was great... I loved OS/2 2.0 in particular (and I worked for IBM testing OS/2 LAN Server for a summer)... but IBM had no idea how to address the market and no sense of how fast it was evolving.