Those people should have spoken up when their hardware manufacturers abandoned OpenCL. The industry set itself 5-10 years behind by ignoring open GPGPU compute drivers while Nvidia slowly built their empire. Just look at how long it's taken to re-impliment a fraction of the CUDA featureset on a small handful of hardware.

CUDA shouldn't exist. We should have hardware manufacturers working together, using common APIs and standardizing instead of going for the throat. The further platforms drift apart, the more valuable Nvidia's vertical integration becomes.

Common API means being replaceable, fungible. There are no margins in that.

Correct. It's why the concept of 'proprietary UNIX' didn't survive long once program portability became an incentive.

Is my impression wrong, that people understood the need for OCL only after CUDA had already cornered and strangled the market?

I attended a Webminar from Khronos were no one in the panel understood why the research community would want anything beyond C to program GPUs.

Meanwhile NVidia was adding C++, Fortran, PTX, supporting other programming language communities trying to target GPUS (Java, .NET, Haskell,..).

Making it as easy to debug GPUs as modern graphical debuggers for CPUs, building libraries,...

Intel, and AMD together with Khronos did this to themselves.

You're mostly right. CUDA was a "sleeper product" that existed early-on but didn't see serious demand until later. OpenCL was Khronos Group's hedged bet against the success of CUDA; it was assumed that they would invest in it more as demand for GPGPU increased. After 10 years though, OpenCL wasn't really positioned to compete and CUDA was more fully-featured than ever. Adding insult to injury, OS manufacturers like Microsoft and Apple started to avoid standardized GPU libraries in favor of more insular native APIs. By the time demand for CUDA materialized, OpenCL had already been left for dead by most of the involved parties.

AMD's budget isn't measured in people, it's measured in dollars. HN commenters don't necessarily decide how many graphics cards their business will buy.