I believe a lot of people had the experience your company had at that time. But... x86 (and Linux and Windows) started killing Unix and the other architectures

I believe a lot of people had the experience your company had at that time. But... x86 (and Linux and Windows) started killing Unix and the other architectures a lot sooner than Opteron. At some point in the late nineties, SGI's workstation people pretty much curled up on the floor in the fetal position, moaning, "Windows NT, Windows NT." That spectacle was downright undignified, although the NT box they produced was impressive in its way. (They made some nice contributions to Linux nevertheless. Would that they had taken Linux even more seriously.) It says something about their outlook on the future of MIPS, as well as UNIX, that SGI designed their Visual Workstation using Pentium in an era when Windows NT on MIPS was still a thing. You can't quite say that AMD64 killed sun. Sun actually made some decent, if overpriced, Opteron stuff. Sun's demise is a fun thing to discuss because former Sun employees often have an interesting opinion about where Sun went wrong. I'm waiting for the guy who says something like "yeah, that was my department's fault. We blew it and the company failed." So far I haven't seen that.