It's also interesting to think about what would have happened if Rick Belluzzo hadn't been in the right place to convince both HP (as a VP) and then SGI (as CEO) to make large bets on Itanium and Windows. I don't think the market would have supported that many more expensive CPUs – fab economics are brutal – but two of the major players giving control over key parts of their design to Intel & Microsoft significantly accelerated that trend.

SGI is interesting because they _owned_ the 3D space and shortly before he went to Microsoft, SGI gave nVidia and Microsoft very cheap licenses to their extensive collection of patents and other IP. It's interesting to imagine what might have happened if, say, SGI had switched to Intel but with fewer gambles on unproven technology: x86 and Linux or the internal IRIX x86 port instead of Itanium and the heavily modified Windows NT derivative which was very expensive to support and forced all of their developers to make massive code changes. Similarly, they were focused on the high-end 3-D market (engineering, science, animation, etc.) and dismissed the PC gaming business as insignificant and basically gave it to nVidia along with a bunch of their staff; had someone a little short-sighted been involved that would have made a big difference in their bottom line.