Interesting that Linux doesn't come up once in the article, and that it is the equally doomed Sun that is perceived as the competitor (and WinNT).
Sun had the lion's share of Internet server installations at the time, but Microsoft's IIS was beginning to nip at their heels. Linux was what we played with at home, because it was "close enough" to what we worked on at the office, but didn't require us to spend thousands on hardware.
It used to be well-accepted to drop $18K on a baseline engineering workstation + monitor (1995-98, say -- I just checked an old quote for a Sparc Ultra that sat on my desk).
It must be said that the graphics and floating-point performance of those systems well outpaced high-end PCs running Linux.
The 1.0.9 kernel released in 1995 was the first to support IDE-ATAPI controllers. Only rich people had SCSI at home.
To get properly working 2D graphics was a black art in itself, let alone 2D accelerated graphics or any kind of 3D support that could rival Graphics Workstations.
The company had a name starting by Xi something and I think the cards were still those that you had to pair a 2D with a 3D card.
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/history-tree
I see IXMICRO and MXIC (Macronix) on there.
WinNT had the last laugh over all of them.