Intel failed to anticipate the smartphone revolution despite RIM being a customer of XScale. To be fair, they only entered because they got StrongARM from a law suit settlement with DEC in 1997 and they sold to refocus on more strategic segments which turned out to be actually a lot less interesting. I don’t think Intel can really be seen as a model of good strategic thinking.

But all of this is a decade before what we are discussing here. I didn’t even remember XScale existed at Intel while writing my first comment.

Allen Baum has some inside baseball on this:

  When the Microelectronics Group was transferred to Intel,
  that included the StrongARM Group. A month later, everybody
  in the StrongARM Group had pretty much quit.

https://youtu.be/wN02z1KbFmY?si=Gnt4DHalyKLevV2p

From 2:03:30 he points out that the only purpose of the DEC lawsuit was to facilitate the sale to Compaq without the microelectronics group.

Intel has made and killed ARM socs since then. Like Keem Bay.