Despite all undertaken attempts, DEC didn't manage to make the pricing of its products (processors, chipsets, and mainboards in the first place) affordable for the majority of potential customers. For example, in the beginning of 1995, 266MHz and 300MHz EV5 were offered for $2,052 and $2,937 respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities, which was an enormous price, even taking into account the average manufacturing cost of $430 for a single MPR model. Considering the price per one "unit" of SPECint92, EV5 cost about twice as high as the competitor RISC designs! At the same time, a standard chipset for EV5, Alcor, was offered at a much lower price: $295 per piece in 5,000-unit quantities, though the only Alcor-based mainboard from DEC (EB164, with 1MB of B-cache) bundled with a processor and 16MB of main memory (by the way, that was not enough to run most applications even in those days) was offered for about $7,500. Mistake #4.

Although Alpha was declared an "open architecture" right from the start, there was no consortium for its further development. All R&D actions were handled by DEC itself, and sometimes in cooperation with Mitsubishi. In fact, though the architecture was free de jure, its most important hardware designs  were pretty much closed de facto, and had to be licensed with the following fee payments (if could be at all). So, it wasn't really helping to promote the architecture. Note that soon after the introduction of EV4, DEC's management offered Intel, Motorola, NEC, and Texas Instruments to license the production of their processor. But all these companies were involved in different projects already and EV4 was either of very little or completely no interest to them. So, they refused. Perhaps, the offered licensing conditions were also unacceptable, or maybe there was some other reason for that. Mistake #5.

After all, even the fastest computer without an operating system and accompanying software is just an expensive source of noise and an environmental heater. DEC targeted its Alpha hardware for Windows NT, Digital UNIX, and OpenVMS, in exactly this order of preference. Could be Ok, but...

Windows NT was an operating system designed for users, not for programmers (since it contained no integrated software development tools), that is why it depended significantly upon precompiled applications, commercial ones in the first place. In fact, the amount of Alpha-ready and i386-ready software titles differed by a few times. The launch of FX!32 in 1996 could have probably saved the situation in a way, as it was an excellent emulator and translator of x86 code to Alpha, developed by Anton Chernoff's team. However, unlike the applications natively compiled for Alpha, it caused about 40% performance drop. Then, there were drivers, and FX!32 was of no help there. So, since very few developers agreed to work on driver versions for Alpha, all the hopes could be pinned Microsoft and DEC only. Finally, Windows NT (3.51 as well as 4.0) was a 32-bit OS even when it worked on 64-bit Alpha hardware that is why it was unable to take the true advantage of the potential of the latter. But, all these issues didn't prevent DEC from promoting its Alpha systems with a slogan "Born to run Windows NT". All in all, this OS shouldn't have been positioned as the primary OS for Alpha architecture, though having it available as an option was a big plus for the architecture. Mistake #6.

OpenVMS and Digital UNIX (also known as DEC OSF/1, and later as Compaq Tru64 UNIX), two reliable and scalable commercial operating systems from DEC, didn't become very popular because of their high prices (for example, over $1,000 for one copy of Digital UNIX in 1997), and closed source code. Moreover, these operating systems were not free from a few other drawbacks (such as even more limited hardware support than that of Windows NT). If either of these OS’s was set free together with DEC's excellent software development tools, it could play a significant role for strengthening Alpha’s positions in the market. Mistake #7.