Xeon Phi failed for a number of reasons, but one where it didn't need to fail was availability of software optimised for it. Now we have Xeons and EPYCs, and MI300C's with lots of efficient cores, but we could have been writing software tailored for those for 10 years now. Extracting performance from them would be a solved problem at this point. The same applies for Itanium - the very first thing Intel should have made sure it had was good Linux support. They could have it before the first silicon was released. Itaium was well supported for a while, but it's long dead by now.
Similarly, Sun has failed with SPARC, which also didn't have an easy onboarding path after they gave up on workstations. They did some things right: OpenSolaris ensured the OS remained relevant (still is, even if a bit niche), and looking the other way for x86 Solaris helps people to learn and train on it. Oracle cloud could, at least, offer it on cloud instances. Would be nice.
Now we see IBM doing the same - there is no reasonable entry level POWER machine that can compete in performance with a workstation-class x86. There is a small half-rack machine that can be mounted on a deskside case, and that's it. I don't know of any company that's planning to deploy new systems on AIX (much less IBMi, which is also POWER), or even for Linux on POWER, because it's just too easy to build it on other, competing platforms. You can get AIX, IBMi and even IBMz cloud instances from IBM cloud, but it's not easy (and I never found a "from-zero-to-ssh-or-5250-or-3270" tutorial for them). I wonder if it's even possible. You can get Linux on Z instances, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get Linux on POWER. At least not from them (several HPC research labs still offer those).
Windows has always been a barrier to hardware feature adoption to Intel. You had to wait 2 to 3 years, sometimes longer, for Windows to get around us providing hardware support.
Any OS optimizations in Windows you had to go through Microsoft. So say you added some instructions custom silicon or whatever to speed up Enterprise databases, provide high-speed networking that needed some special kernel features, etc, there was always Microsoft being in the way.
Not just in the drag the feet communication. Getting the tech people a line problem.
Microsoft will look at every single change. It did as to whether or not it would challenge their Monopoly whether or not it was in their business interest whether or not it kept you as the hardware and a subservient role.
Amd/Intel work directly with Microsoft for shipping new silicon that would otherwise require it.