I’ll say that those workstation vendors, most significantly Sun, faced the classic Innovator’s Dilemma-described failure: doing their best shortly before they died.
Sun died in part because they didn't negotiate the dot.com crash. Many startups following it wanted to buy Sun servers with Intel CPUs, they were of high design and build quality, but unless you could put your purchases on credit cards, or were buying an enterprise system's worth of hardware, Sun the company wouldn't give you the time of day. They insisted you use their 3rd party channel including VARs, which also usually wouldn't give you the time of day. So they bought kit from Dell, which actually wanted to sell you stuff, got used to dealing with its quirks and failures, and by the time would be buying enterprise quantities of computers, were on balance happy with buying more of their cheaper Dells.
The also made a big enterprise push, and threw it all away when their failure to check results from off CPU cache memory intersected with IBM's chip radiation problem. Instead of owning the problem, offering a solution like the IBM of old, they first blamed their customers, then made them sign NDAs before Sun would try to fix the problem. In other words, proved they culturally were still a flaky workstation and superminicomputer company, which was not what the enterprise market then was looking for. Nor those who still buy IBM mainframes, z and i (AS/400) series. One of my banks uses the latter as a hosted solution, it's rock solid.
Sun died in part because they didn't negotiate the dot.com crash. Many startups following it wanted to buy Sun servers with Intel CPUs, they were of high design and build quality, but unless you could put your purchases on credit cards, or were buying an enterprise system's worth of hardware, Sun the company wouldn't give you the time of day. They insisted you use their 3rd party channel including VARs, which also usually wouldn't give you the time of day. So they bought kit from Dell, which actually wanted to sell you stuff, got used to dealing with its quirks and failures, and by the time would be buying enterprise quantities of computers, were on balance happy with buying more of their cheaper Dells.
The also made a big enterprise push, and threw it all away when their failure to check results from off CPU cache memory intersected with IBM's chip radiation problem. Instead of owning the problem, offering a solution like the IBM of old, they first blamed their customers, then made them sign NDAs before Sun would try to fix the problem. In other words, proved they culturally were still a flaky workstation and superminicomputer company, which was not what the enterprise market then was looking for. Nor those who still buy IBM mainframes, z and i (AS/400) series. One of my banks uses the latter as a hosted solution, it's rock solid.