[ThrowawayB7]

> "Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware."

Huh? Sun Microsystems pretty much owned the workstation market by the mid to late 1990s, having beat out HP, DEC, IBM, etc. It was their game to lose, which they did. And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

The main buoyancy behind Microsoft's push into the workstation market around Y2K is that Windows 2000 was much cheaper and ran on also much cheaper Intel processors. Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.

[AnthonyMouse]

> And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

When they were selling Unix and the alternative was DOS, Unix was better. Except that Microsoft did everything they could to keep everything tied to their own OS.

> Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.

Sun was already on the decline by the time Windows 2000 was released. How many people were playing PC games on Sun hardware in the 1990s?