I'm thinking that one reason Microsoft won was because of superior developer tools. I admin'd a small Netware 4.x machine back then and I couldn't even tell you what was needed to write an NLM.
Thank you for that reminder. The NLM platform was a fragile architecture.[1] In contrast, both IBM OS/2 and Windows NT of that time period had superior architecture (memory protection, separation of kernel-vs-user address space) for complex applications.
And to add to the other commenter about ease of dev tools -- it definitely was easier to use Visual Basic 3.0 and deploy the app on NT rather than use Netware's NLM SDK that required the C programming language. Even though VB was marketed as a tool for desktop apps, it didn't stop Microsoft shops from deploying VB apps on the server side.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare_Loadable_Module#Progra...
I think you forgot about WYSE, which did this back in the 90s and earlier 2000s.
Here's how I would compress the article's core point...
Windows Server has 3 major time periods:
1) early 1990s: the era of servers as "dumb" file & print servers. This was the time of Windows NT 3.0 and NT 3.5 competing with Novell Netware. At the time, many were debating who would win the server wars based on superficial things like NT having a GUI whereas Netware had a text console, etc. Arguing about those details was missing the point of what would dominate the next era...
2) mid 1990s to mid 2010s: the server as an "app server". Instead of being just a dumb file & print server, the programming API the server exposes enables complex applications to be built on the platform. This is where Windows Win32 API beat out Netware's NLM (Netware Loadable Modules) as a programming interface for things like mail servers (MS Exchange wins), http servers (MS IIS Intenet Information Server wins), databases (Sybase and MS SQL Server), etc. (The "wins" in this context was the defeat of Novell and IBM OS/2 -- not Linux.)
3) 2016 and beyond: the "abstraction level" of IT thinking has moved beyond "file & print server" and also beyond "app server" to the "cloud as the operating system". In this new era, the server o/s itself is no longer a centerpiece of conversation but merely a small component of a larger private cloud stack (e.g. upcoming Azure Private Cloud). This is why Windows 2016 has features such as containers, micro footprint configuration, etc.
Once one has the broad brush strokes above, I think it's easier to overlay the progression of hardware technologies on top of it to see how they enabled each era. If instead, you interweave the hardware stories throughout the article, the macro trends are too easily buried in the details.