You are talking about the phase where stuff was not publicly known. I talked about the point of it becoming publicly known.

The way that it actually happened, rather than being the way that Intel expected it to happen with this paper all nicely ready on the first day (like Google's happened to be ahead of time), was pretty clearly unfortunately very much down to the premature disclosure. Witness what Paul Turner said (hyperlinked from one of the aforegiven discussions) about Google's and Intel's original goals for the week, for example.

One can speculate about an alternative universe where Linus Torvalds had this to read before the press releases. There's a whole chapter that addresses the points that he raised.

* https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/3/797 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16066968)

It is interesting that you bring up M. Ionescu. I'll see M. Cantrill's surprise at no-one commenting on Intel's paper, albeit that this is becoming less and less true by the minute by dint of posts like yours and mine, and I'll raise him no-one on Hacker News commenting at all on Microsoft; even though it was a more prominent topic of discussion in my workplace today (when the office systems administrator found out that updates were not happening) than any Linux machine or BSD. (-:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076660