Noted as an improvement of its predecessor, Microsoft Windows gained more sales and popularity after the release of the operating environment, although it is also considered to be the incarnation that remained a work in progress.

The operating environment was succeeded by Windows 2.1 in May 1988, while Microsoft ended its support on December 31, 2001.

[4] The other variant, named Windows/386, was available as early as September 1987,[10] pre-dating the release of Windows 2.0 in December 1987.

[15][16]: p.2  The variant had fully preemptive multitasking,[7][16]: p.2  and allowed several MS-DOS programs to run in parallel in "virtual 8086" CPU mode, rather than always suspending background applications.

[17] With the exception of a few kilobytes of overhead, each DOS application could use any available low memory before Windows was started.

[29] Support for 16-color VGA graphics, EMS memory, and new capabilities of the i386 CPU in some versions were also added.

Windows 2.0 was dependent on the DOS system and random-access memory was restricted to a maximum of 1 MB due to running in real mode.

[27][39] Due to its improvements, Microsoft Windows gained more popularity after its release and its interface was considered to be easier to manage.

[40] Stewart Alsop II predicted in January 1988 that "Any transition to a graphical environment on IBM-style machines is bound to be maddeningly slow and driven strictly by market forces", because the GUI had "serious deficiencies" and users had to switch to DOS for many tasks.