It was not merely Linux, but it was also PC commodity hardware that rapidly caught up to workstation-quality. Toward the end, you had Suns with PCI buses and st

It was not merely Linux, but it was also PC commodity hardware that rapidly caught up to workstation-quality. Toward the end, you had Suns with PCI buses and stuff. The UEFI frameworks, and high-quality peripherals that could make it to the mass market, were poised to beat the pants off all the bespoke stuff coming out of workstation manufacturers like Sun, HP, Digital, SGI, and IBM. Sun was very much a hardware VAR, and they made great software because people would purchase premium hardware to run that great software on. The dual prongs of Linux plus commodity PC hardware damaged both of those selling points simultaneously, as it were, and no Unix workstation vendor could survive. The more adaptable ones embraced Linux and they embraced that commodity hardware (IBM, RHEL...) but even with their Java initiative, Sun could not survive the onslaught.