More's the pity, your excellent metaphor had no place for that wonderful IBM system, OS2. As far as I know, it's dead now, but it was the fraternal twin of Windows, and was much better--and stable, stable, stable!

Unfortunately, IBM is not the merchandiser MacroHype is, and OS2 lost out.

I was a very happy camper operating on OS2, but vendors didn't support it. If I had problems with say a printer, the printer's support function would say,
(A) We don't support OS2; and
(B) Your problem is OS2's fault, not our product's. Eventually I had to hold my nose and adopt fenestration in order to get support from third-party vendors.

Dave Oesterreich