To be fair around WinNT 4.0 and Win2k, Microsoft had much better operating system compared to Linux. FreeBSD and Solaris were much better competitors.
Even when they open sourced Solaris, after he left, they did it as a half-measure with an anti-GPL license and then I think Oracle pulled the plug and doomed Solaris to the dustbin of history.
That said, it is reasonable to ask whether Solaris should have simply been placed under the GPL or a permissive license.
That didn't scream confidence in their ability to migrate to Open Source or their overall technical superiority, despite some very nice features.
Had they moved sooner to open source, and embraced it instead of trying to create a moat around their stuff, they probably could’ve stayed relevant.
That's so true.
But OmniOS and OpenIndiana still work excellent.
NT or Solaris were actually better and BSD variants had been around for a while.
Samba and Apache were the driving forces back then. In Germany, SUSE had great influence.
But Linux success is still amazing.