Comment by cmrdporcupine
4 years ago
It was really hard to resist the tidal wave of commodity x86 hardware at that point in time. Nobody did, not even Apple. And the server market got eaten by Linux, Solaris had no serious advantage anymore despite being a quality product.
It really is a different story now, though. There's room for more diversity, though they'd probably have to have made the switch to Linux.
Open sourcing Solaris earlier on before Linux ate the whole market -- or embracing Linux, or taking some hybrid approach, could maybe have kept them relevant.
Many would state that even today there are quite a few features that Solaris does much better than Linux, but so is "progress".