The giant Microsoft has sold many products that have been huge successes and others that have been huge failures. Windows Phone, the Zune MP3 player and, more recently, Cortana, Bing or Edge, have all been disappointments that failed to attract users. But the worst of all was definitely OS/2 for match 20.
This is a Microsoft operating system 11 units were sold and eight were returned. They made a total of just three sales.
Of course you don’t know what is Microsoft Match 10 and Match 20. Bad idea, poorly managed. His failure was complete.
Microsoft’s lowest-selling product: OS/ 2 for Match 20
In the late 80s of the last century, the PC market was boiling. Almost every year there was a new processor and architecture that tripled the performance of the previous one. From the 8086 processors with just over 4 MHz and 8-bit architecture, we went to the 286, 386, 486 with speeds of 33 MHz and 32-bit architecture.
It was a golden age for hardware, but a nightmare for companies. After 2-3 years, their computers became obsolete and it was very expensive to replace them all.
Microsoft came up with a solution: put it up for sale expansion cards with a modern processor and more RAMto install on older PCs. This is how it was born Microsoft Match 10:
Just as he tells Tom’s equipmentwas not very successful, but Bill Gates’ company tried again with Microsoft Match 20which incorporated an Intel 80286 processor and additional RAM via an expansion port to save a slot on the motherboard.
In addition, he developed OS/2 for match 20its business operating system optimized for hybrid hardware Match 20. We already know the result: 11 copies were sold and eight were returned.
Those Match 10 and 20 cards were a bad idea from the start: they combined hardware with different architectures, and that made performance worse than a PC with that hardware. They were also quite expensive: buying a new PC was more expensive.
OS/2 for Match 20 was the lowest-selling product in Microsoft’s history. A record that is almost impossible to beat.
