In an article from 2009 about the history of Itanium — "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry" — journalist John C. Dvorak reported "This continues to be one of the great fiascos [bad situations] of the last 50 years" . Technology writer Ashlee Vance wrote that slowness in speed and release "turned the product into a joke in the chip industry." In an interview, Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."