Cooperation and Competitors
“From my point of view the most interesting thing was the way he took me back to 1985, when I was a Sun Microsystems Senior Technical Support Specialist and the brave talk in the company was about how we would “bring Unix to the desktop”. Right. What actually happened, of course, was that Apollo and Digital (where are they now?) and H-P and Sun and IBM all spent years beating the hell out of each other for dominance of the corporate Unix desktop market, only to wake up and find that a young upstart called Microsoft, more focused on their goal and with fewer competitors trying to exploit their chosen (and by then non-proprietary) hardware platform, had taken control of the desktop while the Unix vendors were still licking the wounds they’d given each other.”