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by mekster 2046 days ago
> Intel is far from incompetent, they just decided to get advantage of their monopoly position to reap as big profits and margins as they could get for the longest possible time

That sounds exactly like an incompetent strategy by being lazy ignoring possible competitors.
1 comments
lmm 2046 days ago
Nothing incompetent about making a fat profit. We'd like to imagine that companies should always innovate as hard as possible, but it's not always the winning strategy.
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olliej 2046 days ago
I think the point that they were trying to make is that sabotaging long term profits by maximizing short term profits is less profiterole over the long term. Which would make it incompetent for the company, but because of earlier cashing out, possibly not incompetent for the specific people making those decisions.
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lmm 2046 days ago
We'd like to think that long term strategies are always better, but again that's not always true. Sometimes it's better to realise some profits now.
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mekster 2046 days ago
But Intel saw it coming when they're left out of the mobile market and ARM had been advancing rapidly for over a decade, not to mention x86 has been too old now.
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lmm 2046 days ago
That doesn't necessarily mean that there was a better path available to them. If Intel moved away from x86, a lot of their strategic advantages would disappear; they'd be one player among many, and they wouldn't have the vertical integration advantages of people actually making full ARM-based systems. Meanwhile there's plenty of money to be made from x86 for decades yet, from clients that put a high value on backward compatibility (which Apple don't, not in the same way - after all, they've done this twice already).
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fauigerzigerk 2046 days ago
>If Intel moved away from x86, a lot of their strategic advantages would disappear; they'd be one player among many

They are in fact one player among many. Their strategic advantages have evaporated. The entire mobile space passed them by and now AMD is seriously threatening their x86 business. Something has clearly gone very wrong at Intel. Shareholders can't be happy about that.

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mekster 2046 days ago
I'm in no position to say but how about just make a division to develop ARM based CPU and take some part of the pie while keeping the x86 cash flow coming?
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