DEC built their business on excellent machines
And software development productivity: it was far faster to write code in a VMS environment than it was in an IBM shop, generally, and networking and clustering not only faciliated deployment, but also compensated for the relatively small range of hardware. For networking and clustering these days read "cloud", but Microsoft's development tools are still generally very good and they'll probably keep x86 flying for some time yet, though the day will finally arrive when .NET developers, at least, aren't going to care much about the target architecture.