[paulmd]

I think it's not a huge mystery, it's exactly what people are talking about higher in this thread or elsewhere in the discussion: the business world has gotten used to treating ARM as an at-cost utility, and there's significant business risk to ARM attempting to shift that model to a more revenue-focused one. Few quotes from around this thread:

> ARM got to where it is by not being too greedy. If others perceived them to be making power grab then a lot fewer people would have been willing to stake their own futures on the architecture.

> No, it shouldn’t. ARM is ARM precisely because it doesn’t charge a huge amount - if it did, it would not be as widely used.

ARM has managed to be successful by becoming a "public utility" that does their work essentially at-cost, which is then monetized by their customers. Everyone agrees that ARM generates a ton of value, but almost all of it is captured by their clients. And the problem is - the customers that were slippery enough to escape other ISAs to ARM are generally slippery enough to do it again if it becomes worthwhile.

You said elsewhere that there's other avenues to raising revenue without customers paying it and I'm curious what you mean, because that really seems to be the problem. I don't really see what you mean - for ARM to make more money, it has to be coming somewhere, and even if it wasn't up-front architectural/SIP licensing fees directly (even if it was, let's say, per-device licensing fees at time of manufacture/sale - like the HDMI Consortium does) those costs are still coming from somewhere and ultimately borne by consumers. It doesn't really matter to me whether I pay $1 a phone for incremental licensing or pay $1 a phone to amortize Qualcomm's license for ARM IPs, it's still the same money either way.