Underlining the extent of the OS/2 fiasco for IBM Corp, the Wall Street Journal has collected figures that suggest that IBM has spent some $850m on development of the operating system itself, and nearly $2,500m all told on the operating system plus applications to go with it – yet has had only $100m or so in revenues from it: it is said still to be spending some $350m on the thing annually, and the staggering expenditure recalls the problem that delayed introduction of the System 38 for a year in 1978 and 1979 when the operating system wouldn’t run adequately on small memory configurations of the machine – IBM threw programmers in enormous numbers at the problem when it would almost certainly have been much cheaper to take a hit on the cost of putting in additional memory and shipped much earlier.
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