There were many early stories about Scott McNealy and his Sun crew going into competitive situations against Apollo, ComputerVision, DEC, HP, Intergraph, Masscomp, SGI, Symbolics, Tektroincs—whoever, really, and there were a lot of whoevers in those days. Competition would argue: "Ours are clearly superior!!" and give a good showing of that. Better networking, display resolution, realtime responsiveness, app performance, rendering speed—whatever metric.
And then Sun would hit back: "Yeah, maybe a smidge better... Not saying it is, but maybe, in an ideal light. On the other hand, with Sun, we cost a lot less. That means you can get 3 or 4 of your engineers empowered with a world-class workstation for every engineer you could with <competitor>." Boom. Those economics were compelling.
It also helped that in those days, Sun workstations became the object of desire for a lot of young developers and engineers, myself included. Sun styled itself into the "it" product.
And then Sun would hit back: "Yeah, maybe a smidge better... Not saying it is, but maybe, in an ideal light. On the other hand, with Sun, we cost a lot less. That means you can get 3 or 4 of your engineers empowered with a world-class workstation for every engineer you could with <competitor>." Boom. Those economics were compelling.
It also helped that in those days, Sun workstations became the object of desire for a lot of young developers and engineers, myself included. Sun styled itself into the "it" product.