Wasn’t Nathan Myhrvold spouting this continuously at Microsoft in the 80’s that RISC was going to take over imminently? While that’s more likely presently than it ever was then, it still isn’t clear that it is even close to happening is it?

The only reason it failed is because there was little incentive to port software away from x86.

Most of us didn't consider writing cross-platform software back then and the few who did were writing software for Unix, not Windows, and that because there wasn't a single dominant OS (Unix was a fuzzy target) and binary architecture you could write for, so you had to think about portability.

Oddly enough, there was a lot of cross-platform work on games in the 80's because the home computer market was very fragmented.

Thanks for this informative response!

haha, thanks Dade