[agentultra]

You can if you want. Pick a board, a chip set, read the manual and get cracking.

The Intel manual is only what, 2200 pages?

I bet you could bootstrap an operating system, compiler, tool chain, and basic tools in a few years. And maybe in ten or twenty years you could have your new development environment up so you can start publishing software for all you new users.

I think the reason it sticks around is because of network effects like platform exclusivity, ecosystem, etc.

[jacquesm]

From experience: it takes about two years so you are quite on the money with your estimate. The hard part is to gain traction.