True, but the other side of the coin is that the massive economics of scale in chip manufacturing as well as around ISA ecosystems (software) meant that some ma

True, but the other side of the coin is that the massive economics of scale in chip manufacturing as well as around ISA ecosystems (software) meant that some massive consolidation of the industry was all but inevitable. Had Intel not embarked on the Itanium project, we might still have ended up with something close to the world we have now, with x86-64 and ARM being the top dogs, and some "traditional RISC workstation" architecture surviving in a small high-end niche (POWER).