Compaq also used to provide publicly-available "testdrive" Alpha servers that you could just shell into. This was way before the idea of cloud computing was mainstream. A lot of gnu+linux/alpha development happened thanks to testdrive.compaq.com (which is dead now, of course).
This was before the Alpha port of Linux happened; if it had been available instead of OSF/1, we would have done more with the machine.
But, yes: if you want to market hardware that nobody else can supply, you need to get it into the hands of people who will use it and evangelize for it.
Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.