I supported a few Alpha customers in tech support in the late nineties. Our NT product was the most advanced thing we made (there were Unix and DOS versions as well) and I specifically remember a Unix admin type of guy grumpily observing on a call, "if I have to run Windows I might as well run it on a real computer."
That conversation would have been shortly after the merger, but before Compaq started gradually killing everything Alpha related in favor of Itanium. Even if Compaq had a little more foresight on that particular matchup, Alpha could never have survived very long after the HP merger, I guess. HP was already building machines for PA-RISC and Itanium, and then there were the minicomputers... how many processor architectures the world was trying to forget about could one company actually support?
That conversation would have been shortly after the merger, but before Compaq started gradually killing everything Alpha related in favor of Itanium. Even if Compaq had a little more foresight on that particular matchup, Alpha could never have survived very long after the HP merger, I guess. HP was already building machines for PA-RISC and Itanium, and then there were the minicomputers... how many processor architectures the world was trying to forget about could one company actually support?