The giant Microsoft has sold many products that have been a great success, and others that have been a great failure. Windows Phone, the Zune MP3 player and, more recently, Cortana, Bing or Edge, have been disappointments that have not attracted users. But the worst of all, by far, was OS/2 for Match 20.
This Microsoft operating system sold 11 units, and eight were returned. In total, they only made cash with three sales.
Surely you don’t know what is Microsoft Match 10 and Match 20. A bad idea poorly managed. His failure was total.
Microsoft’s least-selling product: OS/ 2 for Match 20
At the end of the 80s of the last century, the PC market was boiling. Almost every year a new processor and architecture came out that tripled the performance of the previous one. From the 8086 processors at just over 4 MHz and 8-bit architecture, we moved 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. In 2 or 3 years their computers became outdated, and changing them all was a very big expense.
Microsoft came up with a solution: put it up for sale expansion cards with a modern processor and more RAMto install on old PCs. This is how it was born Microsoft Match 10:
Just as it tells Tom’s hardwarewas not very successful, but Bill Gates’ company tried again with Microsoft Match 20which integrated an Intel 80286 processor and extra RAM memory through the expansion port, to save a slot on the motherboard.
Furthermore, he developed OS/2 for Match 20its operating system for businesses, optimized for Match 20 hybrid hardware. We already know the result: sold 11 copies, and eight were returned.
These Match 10 and 20 cards were a bad idea from the beginning: they combined hardware with different architectures, and that made performance worse than a PC with that hardware. They were also quite expensive: it was more expensive to buy a new PC.
OS/2 for Match 20 has been the least selling product in Microsoft history. A record almost impossible to beat.