If i had a "different" ISA to market, I'd think the very first priority would be to have excellent free compilers for it, be they FOSS or not. Write our own and give them away if we gotta. Remove every barrier to people using your product that you can.
IBM doesn't think that way. They're probably using "the longhair hippies can't use this hardware" as a selling point.
I know nothing of the support for the POWER arch out there now... if you do, would you say it could be improved? is "corporate whim" stifling open support for them? Last I messed with POWER i couldn't find docs for what I needed and so just stuck with Intel Sparc and Alpha. (The last two were still viable market presences then; to give an idea of how long ago this was)
... so you "know nothing", but started the discussion by making a strong claim to the contrary, seriously?
The article already lays out the field: The infrastructure groundwork is done (compilers, linux distros, ...), in no small part thanks to IBM funding such efforts. The main limit is hardware availability and overall mindshare, not infrastructure. If you have a reason to develop for POWER it's easy and reasonably well documented in my experience, the problem for the ecosystem is that few people have such reasons. (i.e. you're either an enterprise supplier like SAP or a bunch of nerds at an uni or with a raptor box at home, little inbetween)
In some ways, #2 is sad to me.
Don't get me wrong, I have worked a ton on LLVM and love it.
But at least when i was there, IBM's interprocedural middle-end (TPO) was some of the nicest and well structured C++ compiler code i had seen in a long time.
It was well written, well commented, and well architected.
It may have changed since I left, but my understanding as of a few years ago was that IBM was replacing the front-end with Clang but continuing to use TPO (at least for now).
IBM doesn't think that way. They're probably using "the longhair hippies can't use this hardware" as a selling point.