I mean, this is true, but it doesn't really change a lot of what i said.
It was always something :)
If your ecosystem is stopped in its tracks because someone acquired a small company, it is not a particularly robust ecosystem.
From what i was told (and i was very young and inexperienced when i worked at IBM, so take it with a grain of salt), the baseline issue was always the same on the IBM side - the chip groups controlled most of the budget for the chips, and didn't see any way that spending hundreds of millions to make developer-friendly hardware would have positive ROI.
Most of their revenue was not derived from the customers they thought this might ever attract.
It's similar to why they told Apple to go pound sand repeatedly until Apple switched to Intel - Apple did not make up a really meaningful part of the business of Power chips from where they sat, so they didn't really care about giving Apple what it wanted.
The software folks involved thought this was mostly insane
If your ecosystem is stopped in its tracks because someone acquired a small company, it is not a particularly robust ecosystem.
From what i was told (and i was very young and inexperienced when i worked at IBM, so take it with a grain of salt), the baseline issue was always the same on the IBM side - the chip groups controlled most of the budget for the chips, and didn't see any way that spending hundreds of millions to make developer-friendly hardware would have positive ROI. Most of their revenue was not derived from the customers they thought this might ever attract.
It's similar to why they told Apple to go pound sand repeatedly until Apple switched to Intel - Apple did not make up a really meaningful part of the business of Power chips from where they sat, so they didn't really care about giving Apple what it wanted.
The software folks involved thought this was mostly insane