My horribly underinformed understanding is that MIPS was ultimately a, uh, baseline architecture design in terms of performance to power consumption, particular

My horribly underinformed understanding is that MIPS was ultimately a, uh, baseline architecture design in terms of performance to power consumption, particularly with respect to ARM's exponential progress post-iPhone. The going-nowhere bureaucracy-heavy structure resonates with the impression I got from reading this - I can't help but wonder if: - they brought in outside consultants to "strategize" how to respond to the OpenPOWER / RISC-V "threat" (postulation: RISC-V put the frozen deer in front of the headlights, while OpenPOWER was the foghorn that got them scrambling at the last moment - in any direction) - said consultant wanted to ensure they'd get paid (translation: knew they were talking to a board that expected a yes-team), so simply coughed up "modern/relevant industry standard" advice they (probably correctly) assumed was expected of them: go open - the entire industry went "all riiiiight, free MIPS!", and wasted no time commercially optimizing around royalty-free licencing - MIPS' "overfed" (as you astutely put it) board suddenly saw all their holidays and etcetera flying away - either this happened a while ago and the consultant said to hang on and it backfired, or this just happened recently - Exceptionally loud meetings (probably involving death threats) were had, possibly angry and/or irrational "NO, WE ARE STOPPING THIS NOW" decisions were made, and... ...welp. Given MIPS' execution being "below sea level" (again, as you put it), I get the impression the management had no resonance with the technical architecture of what it was they were managing. So, they couldn't move the innovation forward, only industrialize the process of perpetuating what already existed. Hence, going open without considering how to pull that off in a way that is both financially strategic and brings the best out of the architecture. And because they didn't understand the strengths of their architecture they had no confidence/competence to execute properly in the first place, anticipate the disaster in this approach, or handle it correctly. </naive_anecdotal_theory>