Spolski argues here that it was actually backwards: they weren't commoditizing their compliment, they were commoditizing their core:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

If you sell hardware the last thing you want to do is commoditize hardware, which is what a portable software strategy does. What you want is hardware lockin. Java was the opposite of that. Sun eventually had to be sold, but Microsoft didn't.