I’ve been in a similar situation.

We were promised that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of hardware would be significantly more powerful than it ended up being.

The amount of backlash we received because the quality of the final product we produced was lower than what we showed to the public was insane and continues to this day.

For context, I worked at Ubisoft on Tom Clancy’s The Division. this was the same period where watch dogs released.

I think we did the right thing, not because we chose to and that we were being an altruistic; but because we were forced to- by the first party console manufacturers as part of certification requirements.

If you release something that you know will perform poorly, that’s on you. It doesn’t matter if you’re Intel in this situation or if your Microsoft in this situation they are both equally guilty of allowing it to happen.

How do you assign blame in that situation? You don’t. they both should’ve done better.

as soon as Microsoft realised that Windows Vista would perform poorly on current generation hardware that the majority of the population had they should’ve worked to downgrade the visual elements and optimise the bloat away even at the cost of features.

When Intel realised that the 98% desktop market leader was going to release something that had graphical intensity requirements, they should have put more emphasis and effort into producing higher quality graphics processing capabilities- it’s not like Windows Vista had a short time it was in development for many many years

The right thing in hindsight absolutely would've been for Microsoft to not relent, because of the power balance. Even back then when Intel was still a behemoth, Intel needed Microsoft more than the other way around. Hence why they were the ones begging MS, not the other way around.

What would Intel have done, only supply chips to.. what? Linux machines? Macs? A funny fantasy, obviously unthinkable. Or go wage a marketing campaign against MS? That too in effect would cause lower sales of new machines if anything, directly hurting Intel.

MS would've seen large benefits especially in the long term.

Now this is all very easy to say in 2025, but I think MS should've known this, yet greatly underestimated the negative effects that this would have. The people making the decision probably thought "it'll be okay, and worth staying super chummy with Intel". Probably plenty of golf trips and steak dinners were exchanged.

Ditching or otherwise snubbing Intel would've been unthinkable in that time period; they were the undisputed performance kings on the desktop. Apple themselves had just moved to Intel, and made a big deal out of it, too.