Yep. For both OS/2 and NT, you had to buy an expensive high-end PC off a pretty narrow hardware-compatibility list, and the user experience wasn't too great (long boot times, laggy UI, etc.) The genius of Windows 95 was that it could sit on top of whatever strange legacy DOS drivers you were using and still provide some modicum of stability.
However, as the article mentioned, OS/2 did have huge corporate adoption, especially in finance and insurance. (Largely because IBM bundled it to their mainframe customers.) Most of these places switched to Windows when new OS/2 software dried up around 1996, but it wasn't uncommon to see an OS/2 terminal on a bankers desk well into the 2000s. (And I'm sure some places are still running it in a VM for some old internal software.)
Where IBM didn't have a clue is when they tried to market OS/2 to consumers and smaller businesses. Yes, you could go into the store and buy a boxed copy. But if you wanted to connect your computers to a network, you had to call an IBM enterprise sales rep. Assuming they even returned your call, and you figured out which alphabet soup packages to order, it was about $200/machine for the same basic filesharing which was included in Windows.
"The genius of Windows 95 was that it could sit on top of whatever strange legacy DOS drivers you were using and still provide some modicum of stability."
On the other hand, this helped Novell continue the DR-DOS lawsuit against MS. OS/2 1.x had little drivers initially, but it was beginning to improve by 1991, and OS/2 2.0 could use OS/2 1.x drivers.
However, as the article mentioned, OS/2 did have huge corporate adoption, especially in finance and insurance. (Largely because IBM bundled it to their mainframe customers.) Most of these places switched to Windows when new OS/2 software dried up around 1996, but it wasn't uncommon to see an OS/2 terminal on a bankers desk well into the 2000s. (And I'm sure some places are still running it in a VM for some old internal software.)
Where IBM didn't have a clue is when they tried to market OS/2 to consumers and smaller businesses. Yes, you could go into the store and buy a boxed copy. But if you wanted to connect your computers to a network, you had to call an IBM enterprise sales rep. Assuming they even returned your call, and you figured out which alphabet soup packages to order, it was about $200/machine for the same basic filesharing which was included in Windows.