And that dog box could only run MS-DOS and no Windows programs.
Now it is true OS/2 1.x only ran on an IBM PS/2 but when it came running Windows and DOS it was no match for Windows 3.x itself.
Now OS/2 2.0 did run Windows and DOS program much better than Windows 3.x and it ran on any machine that could run MS-DOS, but it came out after Windows 95.
OS/2 2.0 did this by using the hardware support built-in to the 80386 chip and Windows 95 used that exact same hardware support to greatly improve on Windows 3.x.
Now while OS/2 2.0 was still much better than Windows 95, the race was lost only because by the time it came out Windows 95 was a smash hit.
Also OS/2 2.0 needed a high end 80386 machine with lots of (and very expensive) RAM where as Windows 95 ran just fine on low end 80386DX chips using much less RAM.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/half-...
From that page:
Unfortunately, OS/2 had a crucial flaw in its design: a Synchronous Input Queue (SIQ). What this meant was that all messages to the GUI window server went through a single tollbooth. If any OS/2 native GUI app ever stopped servicing its window messages, the entire GUI would get stuck and the system froze.
In 1996, IBM released OS/2 Warp 4, which included a revamped Workplace Shell, bundled Java and development tools, and a long-awaited fix for the Synchronous Input Queue. It wasn’t nearly enough. Sales of OS/2 dwindled while sales of Windows 95 continued to rise.
Windows 95 was a smash success, breaking all previous records for sales of operating systems.
So to clarify it was OS/2 Warp 4 that finally delivered on the promise of Windows Better than Windows, but unfortunately it just came too late.
Rumors about incompatibilities spread because people preferred to rationalize what they were already doing, and there was a lot of money in tuning and fixing messed-up Windows systems that would have dried up.