Yup. I had a front row seat. So many discussion with startups in the 2Ks that boiled down to "we can get a Sun/HP/DEC machine, or we can get 4-5 nice Wintel b

Yup. I had a front row seat. So many discussion with startups in the 2Ks that boiled down to "we can get a Sun/HP/DEC machine, or we can get 4-5 nice Wintel boxes running Linux for the same price". So at the point where everyone figured out Linux was a 'good enough' Unix for dev work and porting to the incumbents was a reasonable prospect, it was "so do we all want to share one machine or go find 500% more funding just to have the marquis brand". Once you made that leap, "we don't need the incumbents" because inevitable.