When Sun introduced Unix for 386 workstations, they had a chance to pull ahead of the BSD/XENIX crowd and become the dominant desktop OS. At the time, Windows 3.0 (then 3.1) was just getting popular. When Sun dropped their 386 product because they didn't want to support a third hardware platform, they ceeded first place to MS. They had the opportunity to set a single binary API that could have been overwhelmingly popular. Bell Labs/AT&T couldn't productize UNIX successfully, Sun wouldn't, and the result was the Tower of *nix Babel.

Sun was right that the network is the system, but they forgot that clients create the need...