It wasn't luck. For example, the book "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy" has a chapter about the NVidia strategy in its early days. You'll find a lot of similarities

It wasn't luck. For example, the book "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy" has a chapter about the NVidia strategy in its early days. You'll find a lot of similarities to what happened with CUDA. In its early days, NVidia focused on its delivery speed by having a unified software driver/integration strategy. The TNT video card was meh, the TNT2 a little better but inferior to 3Dfx... by the time they launched GeForce, 3Dfx didn't have a product ready to compete. Their driver/integration/product test strategy made that speed possible. With that background you can understand why CUDA wasn't lucky, they repeated the same approach: combine their hardware with the software.