alt Hacker NewsOh you must be right, I mix up my time lines.
In any case the economics were more or less the same as Alpha as for the others. They couldn't support integrated silicon manufacturing. It wasn't even just the manufacturing (which could be outsourced although arguably not as competitively as integrated shops like Intel until TSMC really hit its stride). Or the logic and physical design. But the software development and ecosystem support costs were ballooning too. Alpha like the rest of them just never made sense unless they could make competitive cheap systems that were compatible, and by the time efforts like Windows ports and x86 emulation came along, it was already too late.
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Windows on Alpha and FX!32 were reasonably solid options, as was the general health of the Alpha ecosystem. The platform also was not overextended in dot-com boom as much as let's say Sun. Windows port was also pretty early, even if it was 32bit limited.
The big benefit for EV6 was that it had actual parts commonality with PC, and I do not mean few I/O chips like some of the others (SuperIO, network, etc.) but northbridge - anyone making a K7 motherboard could make an Alpha motherboard, and Samsung became first vendor selling both CPUs and complete systems with non-Compaq chips.
I think you're right overall that Itanium is used too often as the reason why all the RISC platforms died/were cancelled, as if they would have had healthy futures had Itanium simply not existed, but I do wonder about Alpha.
I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms, Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and ISA busses, and x86 emulation at the firmware layer, allowing regular PC peripherals like VGA cards to work. Windows and, significantly, Linux, had pretty superb support for Alpha.
It's not enough to suggest that it had a chance "in any reality", but it seems like a much more potent competitor than PowerPC or SPARC or MIPS, it only because of the platform and OS support. Both Windows and Linux had pretty capable x86 emulation software layers too, and not just at the very end!