It's quite amusing to see an article about a computer with a portrait monitor on a site which really goes out of it's way to fill 1/3 of the horizontal space at most. On a 4k 43" monitor.

/rant

I vaguely remember the NEWS workstation at the time, but it was seen as weirdly different and it wasn’t that cheap compared to the competition. Also, loads of companies came out with diskless terminals — is there any evidence that Sony was a frontrunner here?

It is fun to contemplate the alternative universe in which Sony stayed in the workstation market, but I think Sony was more like DEC than Sun, and it would have ended the same way for all.