Originally the PDP-11s and the CP/M machines were in different markets. DEC's culture was science/tech/academia, selling to educated technical users and OEMs.

The CP/M market was the precursor of the modern PC market - mostly small businesses who didn't see themselves as technical but understood that word processing and spreadsheets could save them time and money.

Minis weren't considered small systems, both for reasons of cost and complexity, so Byte didn't cover them.

By the mid-80s the cost of a PDP-11 had come right down, and was comparable to a high-end CP/M box. DEC made some efforts to sell to small businesses, but never quite understood the people or the market.

Then the IBM PC and its clones appeared and nuked the CP/M market from orbit.

This was DEC's biggest strategic failure. It had about ten years to make the PDP-11 and VAX designs an industry standard. But it was too busy selling expensive peripherals and trying to compete with IBM at the high end to pay attention to what was happening at the low end, and IBM clones stole its lunch.