[temac]

> So much work went into the OS/2 subsystem, but I can't imagine it was important at all to NT's eventual marketplace success.

It was even the reverse that is true. MS support of Win32 instead of OS/2 PM was a strategical choice, and the market and dev strategy was structured in concert. OS/2 did not had a good enough market share, compared to the Win API - hypothetically and then in practice. For Win16 it was not a concern because both could run that well (enough) - and OS/2 used a licensed Windows 3 copy to do that, but then came Win32. Given codevelopment between MS and IBM was not working well, MS used NT retargeted mainly to Win32 in part to kill a competitor, from after they parted ways, on that market.

The strategy has been successful.

[glhaynes]

To be clear, I was talking about early NT's OS/2 subsystem - not about the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 project in general, which I think you're talking about?

[temac]

Yes, I saw you were talking about the subsystem, but I think this is highly related to the whole picture. The OS/2 subsystem in released NT was neither a critical component, nor was it actually interesting for MS that it became too good. However, it was possible at all, for a lot of reasons, because NT was originally intended to be NT OS/2.