[relistan]

It was fairly competitive, but it also took quite awhile to build up a full set of applications. Real NT didn’t run a lot of older Windows apps. And the hardware it ran on didn’t scale vertically in the server market like the UNIX systems. So it took some time for the software to fully arrive and some time for the hardware to get fast and big. And the UNIX vendors failed to see that the initial disadvantages were just that: initial. With the price of PC hardware behind them, Microsoft overcame those disadvantages quickly. Had a real UNIX been available on the same hardware and had a similarly aggressive and well financed vendor behind it, there might have been a chance. But none of the UNIX vendors took that market seriously. We shouldn’t forget though that MS hedged their bets on PC hardware and ported NT to DEC Alpha. So even they did not see the inevitability of the rise of PC hardware.