Linux wasn't shocking or daring back then. Literally everyone could see that proprietary unixes (and their locked-in hardware) were doomed. "Attack of the killer micros" had already succeeded. Exactly which micro was still somewhat unsettled.
I thought that proprietary unix was doomed when I started an internship at a bank's IT ops department in 2005. The seasoned Solaris admins I worked with had commissioned some Linux servers the year before in a non-prod setting and had written it off as a toy...