The failure of the Cray-3 was in large part due to the changing political and technical climate. The machine was being designed during the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and ending of the cold war, which led to a massive downsizing in supercomputer purchases. At the same time, the market was increasingly investing in massively parallel (MP or MPP) designs. Cray was critical of this approach, and was quoted by "The Wall Street Journal" as saying that MPP systems had not yet proven their supremacy over vector computers, noting the difficulty many users have had programming for large parallel machines. "I don't think they'll ever be universally successful, at least not in my lifetime".