[khitchdee]

Execution is about engineers. Intel can't retain their engineers. Without good engineers you can't compete. So you downsize and try compete only on one thing -- better x86. Pat Gs return as CEO does help with engineer retention though.

[ChuckNorris89]

>Execution is about engineers.

Meh, not really. Google has some of the best engineers in the world yet they fail at nearly everything that isn't related to search, android, ads and e-mail.

Even Jensen Huang said that it's more about vision and not all about execution. He said in the early days of Nvidia all of their competitors at the time had engineers good enough to execute, yet only they had the winning vision that enabled them to make and sell exactly what the market wanted, nothing more, nothing less.

[time0ut]

My impression is that most of Google’s failures are strategic. Stadia, for example, has been executed very well in the technical sense. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense strategically. I feel every failure I can think of fits this mold of great technology solving the wrong problem or held back from solving the right problem.

[senttoschool]

Google is very engineering led. From my experience working with software developers, and as a software developer myself, they're really bad at the business aspect of things. They're too idealistic and not practical.

That and their culture of "move fast, fail fast" means they pull the rug just as fast as they lay it out.

[etempleton]

Google’s pricing model didn’t even make sense. Pay for a subscription and then buy the games that will forever be locked on the Stadia service? Why would anyone want to do that. Microsoft was just rolling out Gamepass, why would you not do that in the cloud?

[random314]

> everything that isn't related to search, android, ads and e-mail.

And YouTube.

No wonder they are 10X as valuable as Intel

[t-3]

YouTube was bought due to the failure of Google Video. They couldn't compete, so they acquired.

[nl]

But that was a failure of marketing and strategy (specifically YT decided to take on copyright claims, Google Video didn't try), not execution.

It was Google engineering that allowed YT to scale.

[random314]

Not really. Google video would take 24 hours to make an uploaded video available, whereas YouTube made it available right away.

Google video engineering wasn't up to snuff and management decided to move fast and just acquire YouTube.

[ChuckNorris89]

>Google video engineering wasn't up to snuff

So hiring the best 1337-coders in the world didn't automatically give them the best product? Shocking.

[GoOnThenDoTell]

They acquired Android too

[nl]

>> Execution is about engineers.

> Meh, not really. Google has some of the best engineers in the world yet they fail at nearly everything that isn't related to search, android, ads and e-mail.

Seems to me that Google didn't fail to execute in other things they tried. The products worked fine, but they didn't have a market.

That's not failure of execution, it's failure of strategy.

[khitchdee]

Google used to be search only. Now they have Android. That's pretty good.

[pinewurst]

Android is still basically ads - in that it’s another source of info fodder for their ad machine along with search.

[throwawaylinux]

Google didn't have Android because they had a good engineering team who created it though. They have Android because they had executives with vision who bought Android Inc., and because they had the subsequent humility and vision to override what the engineers had initially developed resteered the project in the wake of the iPhone.

I've noticed it's very hard for a lot of technical people to give credit to executives, marketing, finance, or anyone else when it comes to the success of a technical product, but very easy for them to assign blame to those groups. Whereas those latter groups often seem to be the first to credit engineers with successful products, and willing to share blame for failures.

Maybe it's because I'm in the technical group so I hear insider gossip and rantings, and the other groups project an overly generous facade, but unfortunately sometimes it doesn't feel like it. Ask a sample of nerds about failed projects near to their hearts. DEC, Sun, Boeing, whatever Google chat app they liked, the failed company or project they worked on, etc. 9 times out of 10 you'll hear rantings about greedy management, incompetent finance, the idiots in marketing, etc. who wantonly desecrated the Mona Lisas and Sistine Chapels of Engineering.

Many engineers are very good at taking a problem given to them by their company or one they've dreamed up and optimizing the hell out of it. Very few are capable of identifying problems that will be valued by others, and coming up with approaches to solving them in ways that are cost competitive and marketable. Very few people at all can do that well because it requires a measure of creativity and multi disciplinary vision, but at least executives are supposed to be thinking about these things so they have a chance.

[ChuckNorris89]

And how many other dozens of products did Google build then kill off due to failure? Similar to Intel.

[khitchdee]

Intel does not have a number 2. They only own x86. They have failed to diversify.

[__d]

They have _tried_ to diversify:

They have competitive NICs, although they don't seem to be maintaining the lead there they once had.

They bought competitive network switches. These have largely languished, in part because they sat on the IP and then targeted it at weird niches.

They bought Altera. I feel like it had lost some momentum vs. Xilinx, but with AMD acquiring the latter, it's probably going to end up a wash.

The AI chips are kinda too early to tell, but at least they're playing the game.

Overall, I think they have squandered the massive advantage they had in CPUs for the last 3 decades.

[touisteur]

Oh yeah I'm waiting for their 200G NICs while NVIDIA is ramping up connectx 7 with 400G on PCIe5...

The low end AI chips are a mess. Myriad-X can be used only through openvino, and they've been closing details about the internals... Keembay is... Years late?

Is there anything coming out of Intel these days?

And what happened to nervana systems, became plaidml then disappeared after bought by Intel? Maxas was really great and now, crickets.

Even profiling tools, which they used to be on top of, don't seem to work well on Linux w/ the TigerLake gpu. It's so painful to debug and program, they might as well have not put it in...

[khitchdee]

> Overall, I think ...

That's a reflection of their company culture. They're a bit stiff.

[ChuckNorris89]

>Intel does not have a number 2

Yeah they do, Intel has the FPGA division they bought from Altera. That's a huge business on its own.

And my point still stands: having great engineers is not enough for great execution. You need great leadership with a vision a-la Steve Jobs or Jensen Huang.

[tambourine_man]

And that’s what, 15 years old?

[AnimalMuppet]

The degree of market penetration that Android has maintained for that 15 years is a pretty impressive feat, both strategically and technically.

[R0b0t1]

Necessary but not sufficient is the phrase.

[djmips]

Self aggrandizing I feel. Vision is helpful but Nvidia still had better engineers than the rest.

[abudabi123]

The sweetspot secret sauce is for leadership to superposition the talent's output in the product. I don't know if ever Microsoft's ecosystem did this. While watching Google's acquired Deepmind defeat China's Go-champ I was playing with everything top of the line from Microsoft's ecosystem and the whole was less than the individual parts in quality, design, etc, put together. Apple has at times achieved this while under Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs's vision was decades and decades ahead of the curve if you go through his interviews. You get this sixth sense is in Elon Musk.

[alfalfasprout]

It's a bit of everything but yeah, what I've seen is basically that Intel has a combination of absolutely insane talent working on some really hard problems and a lot of mediocre talent that they churn through.

And the reality is that yeah, with their comp for engineers so abysmally bad why would anyone really go there? Especially when it's not like they're getting great WLB.

[khitchdee]

Their stock options are not worth anything now. It's no longer a great place to work. Because they do not show you the money.

[PaulHoule]

For the last 20 years there have always been stories in the press about how Intel is laying off 10,000 engineers. It never struck me as a very psychologically safe place to work.

[AnimalMuppet]

IIRC, they had (maybe still have?) a policy of laying off the bottom 5%. Every year. For a company that size, it's a lot of engineers.

But yes, that probably does not make it a psychologically safe place to work...

[PaulHoule]

It's a dangerous policy because the one person who never gets laid off is the narcissist who is good at managing people's impressions of them.