Yeah in retrospect, it feels somewhat inevitable to me that Linux (or something similar if that hadn't happen) would displace it all and demolish the business model of "Unix as commodity", given Unix itself was clearly initially aimed at trying to popularize/democratize a set of technologies/techniques/concepts that had been previously locked up inside larger corporations and projects. The motive force of "getting this out there" was there, and was bound to escape the workstation maker's clutches.

I didn't live through the minicomputer era, but definitely grew up in the "Unix [and then Linux] ascendant" era and was an early adopter (as a user) of Linux on my 486. We just wanted what all the cool kids [err, adults] had. I spent many hours fine tuning my X11 environment to look like the screenshots I saw in UnixWorld of real Unix workstations, etc. ... without doing any actual "real work" with it...

Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume.

I'm not sure how Sun could have saved itself without just turning itself into a services company, just too hard to win on economies of scale making actual hardware. They made hay while the Sun(tm) shone, I guess.