I suspect that whatever the virtues of the Alpha architecture [1], DEC simply didn't have the muscle to stay in the game with exponentially increasing R&D costs

I suspect that whatever the virtues of the Alpha architecture [1], DEC simply didn't have the muscle to stay in the game with exponentially increasing R&D costs. [1] And it's not like Alpha was some shining beauty of ISA design either. Early versions lacking sub-word load/store, the absolutely crazy memory consistency model, ...