Which does a good job of proving my case. SUN very much didn't want to provide "less completion for HP" (albeit I very seldom heard a good word for HP-UX).
Indeed, and it's something I've been thinking about if I were in charge of Symbolics at the beginning.
But it's also in part 20/20 hindsight, e.g.:
Lots of people refused to believe that Moore's Law would last as long as it has; the corollary that you'd get higher speeds purely from design shrinks did end about a decade ago.
I'm not sure very many people "got" the Clayton Christensen The Innovator's Dilemma disruptive innovation thesis prior to his publishing the book in 1997. He really put it all together, how companies with initially cruddy products could in due course destroy you seemingly overnight.
In this case, how a manufacturer of rather awful CPUs (the 286 in particular, but the 8086/8 was no price except in cost; caveat, Intel support to people who design in their chips was stellar back then), could start getting its act together in a big way in 1985 with the 386, then seriously crack their CISC limitations with P6 microarchitecture (Pentium Pro), etc.
And note their RISC flirtation with the i860 in 1989, their Itanium debacle, etc. etc. More than a few companies would have committed suicide before swallowing their pride and adopting their downmarket, copycat's 64 bit macroarchitecture that competed with the official 64 bit one.
And that's not even getting into all the mistakes they made with memory systems, million part recalls on the eave of OEM shipments, etc. What allowed Intel to win? Superb manufacturing, and massive Wintel sales, I think.
