If the market for something is already established it makes sense to stick to "serious customers".

If the market isn't established then you may need to get traction with the dreamers and misfits.

I see this happen with software projects, too. For example, I'm pretty sure that this same phenomenon is the main thing that killed Smalltalk.

I presume that the performance segment that Itanium was intended for is Intel's most profitable. So everyone who proposes to make server chips targets that segment, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else.

Having seen this play out a number of times I don't think targetting that segment and only that segment is a great idea.

I'm convinced sales forecasters don't actually understand how software ecosystems work.

From a stack perspective, you can't really go it alone anymore. The total necessary software universe is too large to rebuild on a reasonable timescale, and too expensive to rebuild by oneself.

IBM is about the smallest scale that can do this -- and even they're leveraging decades of effort.

IBM and Apple. Which makes Apple's Big Brother ad even funnier.

Although IBM is doing it x2, with s390x and also with POWER.