Alpha is a painful loss for sure, and the end result for Itanic makes HP look bad. But I guess they were looking at the figures to stay at the top with respect

Alpha is a painful loss for sure, and the end result for Itanic makes HP look bad. But I guess they were looking at the figures to stay at the top with respect to manufacturing costs going forward at the time, which is just brutal when competing with chips produced in much larger quantities such as x86. We're talking tens of billions of dollars here which Alpha had no chance of recouping, ever. IBM/Power has/had similar challenges.