[jandrese]

I think the idea is that the open fab shops just have a hell of a lot more work than Intel and greater economies of scale. Making zillions of mobile chips means big money even if the profit margin per chip is smaller. This in turn means more R&D and eventually they overtake the company that only fabs their own desktop processors and chipsets.

In the long run Intel screwed themselves over by not leasing out fab time to other companies. They put themselves in a niche in an industry that is naturally dominated by the largest player. And it's extra embarrassing that they did so because they knew very well how important it was to be the biggest--they were for a few decades!

Maybe Intel could have held on longer if they had a successful mobile chip to stuff into billions of smartphones, but their mobile efforts were short lived and seemed to be treated with disdain by the management. The first product kind of sucked and instead of sticking with it and improving they just threw in the towel, both on mobile processor and the baseband chip. An embarrassing misstep for a company as big as Intel.

[trhway]

>In the long run Intel screwed themselves over by not leasing out fab time to other companies.

sounds like Google who also treated their cloud/fabric computing as a competitive advantage to be kept to themselves and as result they missed the cloud business.

>their mobile efforts were short lived and seemed to be treated with disdain by the management.

classic. Low margin high volume future usually can't survive in the shadow of the high margin cash cow of yesterday that is still being milked.