The tale of major incumbents' completely bungled OS/Platform projects of the 80s and 90s really is one of the great epics of the field.
A short - and playing it a little fast and loose for narrative like a Malcolm Gladwell piece - telling of the circumstances:
Apple failed utterly with Taligent, and Copland, and mismanaged A/UX into the ground, so it's the mid 90s and they're shipping a hyper-extended version of a one-off from 1984 that had to be hacked for even cooperative multitasking, looking around for a platform to jump on to. With IBM's help in two of those cases. They even, reportedly, batted around giving up and becoming a shell on top of NT or Solaris by porting Quickdraw during their flail in the early 90s. Then they bought NeXT, took one more (and it was at least the third after A/UX and the MAE product which was really more of an emulator, but so was Classic) pass at "Let's slap a Mac-like shell and compat layer on top of a UNIX and call it a day" and got successful selling mostly handheld appliances running basically that stack.
IBM failed utterly with their share of Taligent and the A/UX/AIX merger planning, and mismanaged OS/2 into the ground, until IBM, once of "IBM and the Seven Dwarves" dominance, became a midsize player in the PC market they created (more through incumbent effects than technical prowess), until they gave up and sold the businesses to a Chinese clone maker and retreated to high-end niche markets. (Their spun out printer division, the legacy of their once dominant typewriter business, would also later also be bought out by a Chinese cartridge cloner, so it's almost a theme for them.)
DEC dithered on ...literally everything because they didn't understand the world after minicomputers, so all their talent left as they crumbled (which is also a large part of how AMD64 happened, there is an awful lot of Alpha lineage in the K8 design). Eventually their corpse was consumed by a PC cloner, who were themselves consumed by HP.
The UNIX vendors were too busy infighting to get much done, and all the UNIX-brand-UNIX vendors license cost overhead was too high to put up credible consumer offerings anyway, until eventually a hobby project from some kid in Finland ate their entire software business while Intel (possibly accidentally, Itanium is the culmination of a series of failures - 432,860,960 - for them too) ratfucked their long term hardware projects to death.
...And so Microsoft, then famous for 8-bit BAISCs, slowly abandoning their own successful but mutant UNIX offering (Xenix), managing to sell Seattle Computer Products' DOS to IBM after Digital Research/Gary Kidall (CP/M) didn't want to deal with IBM, and the surprising success of their awful DOS shell, ran away with nearly the entire mainstream OS market for decades by gathering everyone competent from the VMS and OS/2 lineages (they put Dave Cutler and Moshe Dunie in charge) and having them write NT. Running mostly on Intel's inescapable accidental success extension-of-an-extension-of-an-extension legacy architecture.
Spot on man. I think we've all learned that the best tech stack will not win without also having a good sales, marketing, and management team to support it. And if you are completely incompetent at those things it doesn't matter how good your tech is, you will turn into a hilarious failure we'll all be laughing at later. (Though we'll have a lot of fun making YouTube videos where we run all your shit through emulation.) I know people always shat on Microsoft's engineering, though the truth is I think they tried to do the best they could with what they had and they also understood how important backwards compatibility was, and they had to work within that limitation. But I think that maybe they were just a bit jealous that their management was so far ahead of everyone else (really only Apple after Jobs came back could rival them)!
I'm not sure that attributing the successes to "sales or marketing" had as much to do with it as timing and position. Management _failures_ certainly dominated the era, there were vast numbers of unforced errors due largely to managerial empire building, feature creep/novelty seeking, and ambition exceeding the scale of tractable development practices. The note up-thread about "What was important was new people in charge, who unlike the previous Apple management, could actually make decisions. The decisions were often bad, but they were decisions!" is, IMO, a great read on the situation. I've posted in earlier HN threads about my belief in the "Next bought Apple with Apple's money" idea, and the replacement (or reversion since a lot of them were Apple folks to start with) of Apple's management with Next folks in short order. They were making largely the same kinds of decisions that almost bankrupted Next, but under more favorable circumstances.
Even as someone who has run Linux most of the time for like 15 years, the underlying tech in NT is in many ways by far the best design of the OSes that survived to modern maturity. I just hate almost everything they've done with the upper layers of the stack since 7.
A short - and playing it a little fast and loose for narrative like a Malcolm Gladwell piece - telling of the circumstances:
Apple failed utterly with Taligent, and Copland, and mismanaged A/UX into the ground, so it's the mid 90s and they're shipping a hyper-extended version of a one-off from 1984 that had to be hacked for even cooperative multitasking, looking around for a platform to jump on to. With IBM's help in two of those cases. They even, reportedly, batted around giving up and becoming a shell on top of NT or Solaris by porting Quickdraw during their flail in the early 90s. Then they bought NeXT, took one more (and it was at least the third after A/UX and the MAE product which was really more of an emulator, but so was Classic) pass at "Let's slap a Mac-like shell and compat layer on top of a UNIX and call it a day" and got successful selling mostly handheld appliances running basically that stack.
IBM failed utterly with their share of Taligent and the A/UX/AIX merger planning, and mismanaged OS/2 into the ground, until IBM, once of "IBM and the Seven Dwarves" dominance, became a midsize player in the PC market they created (more through incumbent effects than technical prowess), until they gave up and sold the businesses to a Chinese clone maker and retreated to high-end niche markets. (Their spun out printer division, the legacy of their once dominant typewriter business, would also later also be bought out by a Chinese cartridge cloner, so it's almost a theme for them.)
DEC dithered on ...literally everything because they didn't understand the world after minicomputers, so all their talent left as they crumbled (which is also a large part of how AMD64 happened, there is an awful lot of Alpha lineage in the K8 design). Eventually their corpse was consumed by a PC cloner, who were themselves consumed by HP.
The UNIX vendors were too busy infighting to get much done, and all the UNIX-brand-UNIX vendors license cost overhead was too high to put up credible consumer offerings anyway, until eventually a hobby project from some kid in Finland ate their entire software business while Intel (possibly accidentally, Itanium is the culmination of a series of failures - 432,860,960 - for them too) ratfucked their long term hardware projects to death.
...And so Microsoft, then famous for 8-bit BAISCs, slowly abandoning their own successful but mutant UNIX offering (Xenix), managing to sell Seattle Computer Products' DOS to IBM after Digital Research/Gary Kidall (CP/M) didn't want to deal with IBM, and the surprising success of their awful DOS shell, ran away with nearly the entire mainstream OS market for decades by gathering everyone competent from the VMS and OS/2 lineages (they put Dave Cutler and Moshe Dunie in charge) and having them write NT. Running mostly on Intel's inescapable accidental success extension-of-an-extension-of-an-extension legacy architecture.
It's a weird field we're in.