@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.
@jalefkowit I was a kid at the time and a big fan of os/2, so my memory may be untrustworthy, but I thought the is/2 adverts were really great and they did seem to generate chatter. The problem wasn't the content, IMO.
. . . in retrospect, being a teenage fan of an operating system in the 90s was probably why everybody at school thought I was weird and I would be predisposed to like any big budget ad campaign.
I've never really used windows. I went from os/2 to linux to Mac to linux.