In addition to Alpha, PowerPC was shipping in volume, reasonably competitive with a high-end option, and Windows NT had already shipped support for it along with MIPS.
The selling point for Itanium was compatibility but when they failed so badly at that it leveled out the field since you were going to have to recompile anyway.
> Windows NT originally shipped with support for all major CPUs targeted by UNIX workstations, yet all of them faded away until Itanium.
Sure, and as any Linux advocate will tell you, most folks on Windows are stuck there due to the proprietary applications that only run there. They don't care much about the OS, but they need the apps that they know and which have their data locked away.
These apps didn't run on the other processors, so Windows on other arches was mainly a curiosity.
Yes, but that was largely due to Itanium’s initial optimism. My argument would be that had Intel’s x86 line also faltered, you’d have seen a lot more interest in those alternatives which had much better price/performance and also simply things like a suitable range of parts (not many people want to listen to a huge power supply on their desk). I don’t think there’s any path where people would have plunged ahead with VLIW without a radically better compiler scene.
The selling point for Itanium was compatibility but when they failed so badly at that it leveled out the field since you were going to have to recompile anyway.