This is absolutely the key point. They didn't try to compete on performance and didn't try to compete with Intel - both would have been losing strategies. Inst

This is absolutely the key point. They didn't try to compete on performance and didn't try to compete with Intel - both would have been losing strategies. Instead they competed on cost, power and on the ability to work better with other firms who didn't want to support their own architecture. The comparison with MIPS I think is most interesting. MIPS could easily have taken the markets that Arm dominated but the strategy wasn't right.