> Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always. I'm not sure that was Itanium's only problem. Intel's Itanium launch focused on a market that was not capt

> Compatibility and ubiquity wins. As nearly always. I'm not sure that was Itanium's only problem. Intel's Itanium launch focused on a market that was not captured by the so-called "Wintel" monopoly: high performance servers. The software support needed in this market was relatively narrow. Nevertheless, it failed there too. The biggest issue with Itanium is that the juice was never worth the squeeze. It was expensive. The cost to migrate your existing 64bit systems never made sense. So, you might ask, what about 32-bit shops that needed to make the leap to 64 bits? Well, by the time intel and its vendors started getting costs under control, the AMD Opteron hit the scene with commodity 64bit hardware that had the added benefit of full backwards compatibility. And that pretty much killed it.