Remember Compaqs acquisition of DEC, they never recovered.
They did it to get into the high end workstation / midrange market. Remember that they also bought Tandon at about the same time, known for their fault tolerant systems. It did sort of make sense at the time, but then, this was the time when Intel processors began to leapfrog forward in processing power. NT was also designed to run on the MIPS processor, which was in the DEC systems, and those processors were so much more powerful than the Intel processors of that time.
Mark
DEC deserved it.