It did take off and had a long and productive life.
Many, many of the early ISPs and webhosting providers were built on Solaris 2.6 and "7". In the late nineties it was very common to go into a datacenter and see racks full of ultra 2 boxes stacked on one another ...
If you went to college between 1992 and 1999 you were almost assured to log into a SunOS or Solaris system to read your email or ftp or whatever.
It was only when the dot-com money dried up that people (including myself) made the switch to PC based servers in an effort to save money.
Damn it, Apple have a similar thing going in OSX (or whatever their greasy marketing wants to call it this year) but when it was basically offered to the BSDs on a silver platter they didn't want it.
Implying that launchd and SMF are similar shows how little you know about both systems.
Launchd is mostly crappy, obtuse plist files, a semi-broken DAG, socket activation that spins your machine to death.
SMF was an access point to many things, it was clean, concise and pointed you towards the actual things that the OS provided. (like; log files) It was a pleasure to work with.
The only problem was that service definitions were configured with XML, I have never been a fan of XML.
