Gregory's Server
In later years, Os/2 was a better operating system than windows, had more features, was more stable, etc etc tec. IBM did a brief giant advert campaign including buying ad time during the Super Bowl.
And then they just . . . lost interest? By the time Microsoft got around to shipping windows, IBM had ceased advertising OS/2 at all. It was better than the windows that came later, but Microsoft invested a *lot* of money in advertising and it was newer than OS/2. There was no counter-advertising by IBM, just silence.
I bought IBM's C compiler for Os/2 and they had a "register in 2 weeks and we'll send you a free gift" thing. So I did. More than a ~year~ later, a poster arrived. That's a small thing, but their entire promotion was equally ill-timed.
@celesteh IBM never really got the hang of marketing direct to consumers. They had spent 70 years before the IBM PC came out honing their skills at enterprise marketing, and they were still really good at that. But those weren't skills that translated into being able to sell products directly to ordinary people.
When the PS/2 line came out, they spent $50 million to reunite the cast of M*A*S*H in their TV spots. But (1) M*A*S*H had by that point been off the air for years, and (2) they got the cast, but not the rights to use their M*A*S*H characters. So they had them play nameless office workers, which was super bizarre.
Some of the blame of course has to be laid at the feet of IBM's ad agency, Lord Geller Federico Einstein, which had also been behind the Charlie Chaplin-themed ads for the original PC, and which imploded spectacularly two years after the PS/2 campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbH50T9jxVI
@celesteh IBM never really got the hang of marketing direct to consumers. They had spent 70 years before the IBM PC came out honing their skills at enterprise marketing, and they were still really good at that. But those weren't skills that translated into being able to sell products directly to ordinary people.