In retrospect, Itanium was not great. It didn't look like it at the time, and arguably helped Intel overall. The prevailing wisdom throughout the industry was

In retrospect, Itanium was not great. It didn't look like it at the time, and arguably helped Intel overall. The prevailing wisdom throughout the industry was that x86 performance was going to be harder and harder to get, and that Intel needed to do something. Intel staved off this criticism for awhile with Itanium, and had a fallback if they got really stuck on x86. Of course, AMD with Opteron twisted the knife.