In one sense, workstation operating systems eventually did win out over traditional PC operating systems. This happened in 2001, when the release of Windows XP

In one sense, workstation operating systems eventually did win out over traditional PC operating systems. This happened in 2001, when the release of Windows XP was the first version of Windows for consumers that was based on the NT kernel instead of MS-DOS (before then, Microsoft had two concurrent versions of Windows: one based on MS-DOS for home users and one based on the NT kernel for workstation users and servers), and when the release of Mac OS X 10.0 was the first consumer version of the modern Macintosh operating system that was based on the NEXTSTEP-derived Mach/BSD kernel and provided a Unix userland. This was a very big deal since DOS-based Windows and the classic Mac OS were designed for the much more spartan computing environments of the early-to-mid 1980's and thus struggled to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies of the 1990's and early 2000's. Switching to workstation-quality operating systems not only placed desktop computing on foundations that could better adapt with the times, but they also brought much-needed stability to both Windows and the Mac, which had reputations for being very crash-happy. In another sense, what I've noticed is that in computing, the low end tends to eventually catch up in speed and performance with the high end. Here are some examples I could think of: 1. Lisp machines fell out of favor when RISC workstations from vendors like Sun and DEC started outperforming Lisp machines at running Lisp programs. Of course, the AI winter of the 1980's did not help matters. 2. Linux (and to a lesser extent Free/Net/OpenBSD) helped dramatically reduce the dominance of proprietary Unix operating systems such as AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, and Solaris. 3. Once the performance/dollar ratio for x86 chips started exceeding that of RISC workstations, suddenly running Linux or *BSD on commodity PCs became a compelling alternative in many applications to purchasing RISC workstations running proprietary Unix operating systems. Of course, there's another contributing factor to the decline of the workstation: the controversy surrounding the development of the Intel Itanium and its embrace by vendors of RISC workstations to the point of halting further development of those RISC architectures, only for the Itanium to not live up to its promised performance, and then the subsequent development of x86-64 by AMD and Intel's eventual adoption of that architecture, led to an ecosystem where the x86 and x86-64 architectures were utterly dominant from the mid-2000s through the late 2010s, until the rise of ARM.