I think it's a little more than that. The Lisp machines were very expensive (though the single chip version made things like a MacIvory or MicroExplorer somewh

I think it's a little more than that. The Lisp machines were very expensive (though the single chip version made things like a MacIvory or MicroExplorer somewhat more affordable), very proprietary, and generally didn't run the software the mass market was looking for (not that they couldn't...there just was never a Lotus-123 or Wordstar for Symbolics). So there was probably never a path to real economy of scale. But otherwise I think you're spot on, and it's a common arc in this industry: company comes up with a true innovation solving a problem better than the competitors, Moores law does it's thing, suddenly the COTS products are competitive through brute force if nothing else at a lower price point, and company either has to innovate again or embrace a COTS platform. Jim Gettys wrote a neat paper about how this effected high-end video cards back in the early X11 days (admittedly, no longer directly applicable since GPUs are the COTS solution now, but the principle stands).