The divergence from OS/2 and windows3.x was also
influenced by MS getting
Cutler an OS heavy that created DEC RSX-11 and early VMS incantations.
the idea of NT was clean sheet 32bit OS with multitasking, multiprocessing
and inherant networking all of which were glueons for windows. OS/2 was
a different path from NT with a different base designer.
It is interesting that many of the error messages in the pre V3.1 beta releases
referred to OS/2. Maybe it was an almost clean room.
bw