Analysis of sales showed that on average, each PATHWORKS license brought in at least $3,000 USD in server revenue (server HW, SW, storage, printers, networking, and services), so it was a major driver for DEC's revenue in the mid and late 1980s.
Advanced Server was replaced on OpenVMS by Samba at the time of the porting of VMS to Itanium.
Although primitive by modern standards, PATHWORKS was very sophisticated for its time; far more than just a file and print server, it made client microcomputers into terminals and workstations on a DEC network.
The complexity of DECnet by 1980s PC standards meant that the PATHWORKS client was a huge software stack to have resident in MS-DOS; configuring the PATHWORKS client was a complex task, made more so by the need to preserve enough conventional memory for DOS applications to run.
This problem went away once 386-based PCs became prevalent and MS Windows provided built-in support for large amounts of memory.