[Jasper_]

Linux "won" because SGI very loudly shit the bed and betting on Itanium, taking IRIX with it, DEC was in the process of making the future of Tru64 very confusing with the Alpha, a computer that didn't support their flagship OS, and HP was EOLing HP/UX because they bet everything on IBM's OS/2 Warp.

The only big UNIX vendor left was Sun Microsystems, and Solaris indeed dominated the 90s dotcom era. Everybody was running SPARC and SunOS servers.

It wouldn't be until the mid 2000s when Linux started picking up the pieces left behind after Red Hat started their server product and certification program.

For a long time, Linux was strictly a hobbyist OS. It later dominated by simply being the last one standing after everyone else fell.

[mcguire]

The true competitive threat to the Unix vendors wasn't each other, it was Microsoft.

And "for a long time" was actually a fairly short time. Linux began to approach feature-comparability fast, and ran on PCs, not $10,000 workstations (that were getting beat power-wise by PCs).