> challenges with working with MIPS and SPARC was always that their 'parent' organizations (SGI and Sun respectively) were essentially patent trolls when it came to third parties being successful with the architecture.

And that was in part what has killed them.

ARM only got so far thanks to their no questions asked attitude. I heard from people from Chinese fabless companies of ARM DHLing usb sticks to them in the early A8/A9 era, and flying support engineers to them the same day.

Comparing MIPS to them, they had an obviously bad attitude.

First, they barely sold complete solutions, nor worked on their integration (DMA controllers, memory controllers, bus interfaces and PHYs)

Second, they were compete slowpokes. People are telling of them spending weeks to reply to very clear licensing applications, and them nor being able to say a word without going through their lawyers. You were essentially speaking not with sales, or engineers, but their legal department.

Third, patently bad support.

Only when they hit the terminal stage, they seemed to notice that they were doing something wrong