Platform Wars

The Best CPU Ever Engineered Was a Commercial Flop. That’s a Warning for Every Tech Company Today.

The Alpha 21264 was a technical marvelβ€”faster, cleaner, and more elegant than anything Intel offered. Yet it died a quiet death because it couldn’t break the x86 ecosystem’s lock-in. This article explores why being better isn’t enough, and what that means for today’s chip wars between Arm, RISC-V, and custom silicon.

Valve Is Spending Millions to Make Windows Better. That’s Bad News for Microsoft.

Valve is funding an open-source graphics driver (RADV) to run on Windows. It sounds like a gift to gamers, but it’s actually a strategic move to commoditize Windows, making it trivial for developers to target Linux. Once the driver works identically everywhere, Microsoft’s platform lock-in crumbles. Valve is playing the long game to make Windows irrelevant.