I think a few things combined to torpedo it. Firstly we were hit with the dotcom crash. Secondly Sun’s future rapidly looked less bright, and they were the main

I think a few things combined to torpedo it. Firstly we were hit with the dotcom crash. Secondly Sun’s future rapidly looked less bright, and they were the main server partner in the gang. Thirdly there wasn’t (yet) the “Datacenter OS/Orchestration” layer. It didn’t exist and was the part that would allow us (I think worlds largest ISP and shared/dedicated hosting provider at the time) to carve up the data center on-demand. Remember this is ‘99 so there was no VMware server for another ~2 years. Finally, x86 rack servers got “good enough” and that low cost Pee-Cee architecture took over (with more than a little help from Linux). Yes it was hard to orchestrate. Yes it lead to sprawl (before even VM sprawl) but the market didn’t care.