> 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.

The vast majority of Linux installations don’t have a UI, they’re headless, and it was the same with Sun. I.E. the UI is irrelevant to the success or failure of Linux and Sun.

Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.

> But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI.

Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.

Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.

Linux was free, and people will put up with a lot of shit for that.