I was around during the transition but I'd always been on the Tarantella side (I was an architect of the product) and so didn't work on the Unix side directly. Heck our division customers were overwhelmingly running Solaris with Linux picking up in the 2000's.
The Unix side of the business was rapidly shrinking. 1999 was a banner year because everyone had to go out and upgrade their operating systems so they could claim y2k compliance. 2000 was the end of a tech bubble, and also saw a tech downturn. This lead to drastically reduced sales. Throw in Linux getting increased adoption (remember that IBM promised to spend $1 billion on it which gave a lot of credibility), and that SCO's UNIX products no longer had particularly relevant sweet spots in the market.
I don't know of anyone who moved to Utah. The people in California became part of Caldera but I don't know exactly how that was legally structured. Also SCO had folks all over the US and world. At the peak it was ~1,100 employees and $250m annual revenue.
SCO was a good company and many people liked working at the company because they liked many of their colleagues. Employee turnover was quite low because of that. It also had bad points, but what doesn't?
SCO Unix (OpenServer specifically) was great but not from a technological viewpoint. However the vast majority of users were not techies - they were dentists, receptionists, pet cemetery workers etc. OpenServer came by default with a gui that let those regular folk get things done in a friendly way. See my sibling comment about why Caldera wanted OpenServer.
And SCO did have some firsts. It was also very good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It was the first company to offer Internet in a Box. You installed the system, and now were on the Internet (as a server). We were the first to ship a browser (licensed Mosaic). We shipped by far the most copies of Netscape. At one point Pizza Hut started allowing orders over the Internet. It was more of a proof of concept rather than massively used and widespread. But SCO was behind that too.
The Unix side of the business was rapidly shrinking. 1999 was a banner year because everyone had to go out and upgrade their operating systems so they could claim y2k compliance. 2000 was the end of a tech bubble, and also saw a tech downturn. This lead to drastically reduced sales. Throw in Linux getting increased adoption (remember that IBM promised to spend $1 billion on it which gave a lot of credibility), and that SCO's UNIX products no longer had particularly relevant sweet spots in the market.
I don't know of anyone who moved to Utah. The people in California became part of Caldera but I don't know exactly how that was legally structured. Also SCO had folks all over the US and world. At the peak it was ~1,100 employees and $250m annual revenue.
SCO was a good company and many people liked working at the company because they liked many of their colleagues. Employee turnover was quite low because of that. It also had bad points, but what doesn't?
SCO Unix (OpenServer specifically) was great but not from a technological viewpoint. However the vast majority of users were not techies - they were dentists, receptionists, pet cemetery workers etc. OpenServer came by default with a gui that let those regular folk get things done in a friendly way. See my sibling comment about why Caldera wanted OpenServer.
And SCO did have some firsts. It was also very good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It was the first company to offer Internet in a Box. You installed the system, and now were on the Internet (as a server). We were the first to ship a browser (licensed Mosaic). We shipped by far the most copies of Netscape. At one point Pizza Hut started allowing orders over the Internet. It was more of a proof of concept rather than massively used and widespread. But SCO was behind that too.