To me the situation looks quite clear: a GPU has vastly more compute than a CPU. As time goes, we will need and use more and more compute. You just need a way (general purpose language or API) to use that GPU. For some reason, other companies in this space did not see this.

One is a framework, language extensions etc., the other is “heyy here’s an assembler for this year’s GPUs”

Everyone on the panel reacted surprised that it would be something that anyone would want to do, and most of the answers were the kind of talk to us later.

Meanwhile PGI was shipping Fortran for CUDA, this was before them being acquired by NVidia.

This pattern is pretty common in industry. Almost all the huge companies that are winners in technology are those that got on the market and kept the thing alive - that's not sufficient, but it is necessary.