Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I wouldn't blame management for Sun being irrelevant now.

What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic.

Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.

My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS.

Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.

> What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough.

But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.

Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux.

I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too.

Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.