Sort of like when DEC finally recognized that people were buying their hardware to run UNIX. Still remember Armando getting up and saying something to the effect that DEC hardware and UNIX had been synonymous for years and that DEC finally noticed and the held up the first DEC UNIX license (plate).
Clem Cole had--and still has--the Massachusetts UNIX license plate on his car. I don't know when he first got that plate. Armando had the New Hampshire UNIX license plate. It was on a snazzy red Datsun 280 ZX. At the time (early 1980s) I was driving a frumpy rust-bucket Datsun B210. I had the New Hampshire VAXVMS license plate. Armando jokingly threatened to park his sports car next to my car and take a picture of the two OS license plates side-by-side.
AT&T's "consider it a standard" campaign was pretty successful in getting corporate executive types thinking about UNIX. Sort of along the lines of the "Intel Inside" campaign, which actually got ordinary folks to care about whose chip was in their PC.
But AT&T never was able to take advantage of the opening the "consider it a standard" campaign provided. In addition to the reasons Clem cited, I think AT&T simply never learned how to compete in an open market. They had been a regulated utility monopoly for so very long.
-Paul W.