I used OS/2 1.3 - Warp between 1993 and 2000 both as a user and a developer with it as a target platform. Although at the top when I switched to Warp (1994), it was streets ahead of Windows (with the exception of NT 3.1/3.5 - but they had heavy resource consumption for the time!), there were still major problems:

1) The SIQ - Truly horrible - just as for Windows 3.0/3.1, it was just far too easy to get the whole system to lockup (basically all PM based apps used a single system input queue, thus if any blocked for long........)
2) Hardware support, though much improved with Warp was still very iffy, especially back in the days of OS/2 2.1, I remember setting up the netware drivers on my desktop - sheets of typed up A4, lots of config.sys hacking etc.
3) Even back then, the moment Windows 95 appeared (irrespective of it's technical merits), the GUI LOOKed ugly compared to Windows 95s.

It was fast and efficient though, I'll say that for it - a kernel written in assembler, rather than C, but that was probably the very same reason that it was inherently non portable apart from the briefly seen PowerPC version and the briefly living OS/2 2.1 SMP ("Special version"). I don't believe they even supported SMP on anything except that OS/2 2.1 build (i.e. they dropped it again for OS/2 Warp 3 and Warp 4 - maybe I'm wrong).

It's not even a case of "you get what you pay for" anymore:

Sadly even the rather good Nod32 (ESET) antivirus scanner that has consistently been shown to be one of the better AV's (fast, effective and light), is now beginning to give problems.

On Sunday I installed the latest (beta) version of "Free Download Manager", a well regarded, open source windows downloader that I've used for months now. Nod32 decided that the uninstaller was malware and deleted it, so if I want to remove it now, I won't be able to via control panel, since the uninstaller has been deleted!

To me it's beginning to look like the AV industry is now very close to having lost the war against malware. I'm seeing lots of false positives from other AV tools as well.

Mike