Throughout my stint as an IT industry analyst during the 2000s, one of my significant interests was Intel's Itanium processor, a 64-bit design intended to succeed the ubiquitous 32-bit x86 family. I wrote my first big research report on Itanium and it seemed like something of an inevitability given Intel's dominance at the time.
But there were storm clouds. Intel took an approach to Itanium's design that was not wholly novel but it had never been commercially successful. The dot-com era was also drawing to a close even as Itanium's schedule slipped out. Furthermore, the initial implementation was not ready for primetime for a variety of reasons.
Especially with the benefit of hindsight, there were other problems with the way Intel and its partner, Hewlett-Packard, approached the market with Itanium as well. Itanium would ultimately fail, replaced by a much more straightforward extension to the existing x86 architecture.
This short book draws six lessons from Itanium's demise:
- Lesson #1: It’s all about the timing, kid
- Lesson #2: Don’t unnecessarily proliferate risk
- Lesson #3: Don’t fight the last war
- Lesson #4: The road to hell is paved with critical dependencies
- Lesson #5: Your brand may not give you a pass
- Lesson #6: Some animals can’t be more equal than others
While Itanium is the study point for this book, many of the lessons are applicable to many other projects.
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