Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)

Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.

If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn).

> But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world

IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(