I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions from history because you are conflating platforms and companies. People think about the PC as successful because

I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions from history because you are conflating platforms and companies. People think about the PC as successful because the platform is so big. Yet for the company that created the PC it was a failure. IBM lost the PC battle. Sun would have lost whether they had made the software or the hardware, because the platform they made hardware and software for was outcompeted. And anyway I think there is a significant difference. Sun and SGI were essentially hardware companies which happened to make software. I feel Apple is the reverse. It is a software company making hardware. Apple harware was never impressive, sun harware was. Apple was all about the experience the software gave you. The hardware was just built around the software to facilitate that.