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by Karupan 636 days ago
> An engine of financial performance

Cool, new strategy?!

> Through our voluntary early retirement and separation offerings, we are more than halfway to our workforce reduction target of approximately 15,000 by the end of the year. We still have difficult decisions to make and will notify impacted employees in the middle of October.

Oh right.

2 comments

Silly me I thought Intel was a chip company. Turns out it's an "engine of financial performance."
Must be an internal combustion engine, because it's moved by discrete firings.
Gonna be the finest engine you've seen since the industrial revolution. Grease those gears, guys, we're shedding a head count of no less than 15,000 to keep this baby going. And that's just this year.
Look out Moore's Law!

Instead of doubling transistors every two years, look out, new Sheriff in town -- Gelsinger's law : the staff roster halves every two years!

We predict in the coming decades, Intel will consist of a single CEO producing microchips with over a quintillion transistors!

With the results they're getting, what are they supposed to do?
Inovate ? /s
That's not easy. Apparently the amount of employees they have, it's difficult to innovate. I'm not surprised. Innovation is easier in smaller groups of people.
Quality control checks out.
To reach something you need to get rid of something. The 3rd Newton's law.
Every company should strive to be an "engine of financial performance."

What other expectations do you have of Intel?

The amount of engine metaphors I could toss into this discussion are endless.

There is a little bit of "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" with respect to chasing financial performance.

While you can't escape thinking about financial metrics, the goal should be something like creating great products, building a competitive barrier etc. Financials can act as a constraint rather than a goal.

A concrete example is Costco.

Even here, Gelsinger puts it last, which is sort of reads like a constraint. Seems fair.

This is a long term problem. Intel, and other once great American companies, do not have the talent or culture needed to make great products anymore.
Yup, sure. I'd argue one of the factors involved in the long term problem is when the company starts trying hard to make money as opposed to serving customers well (again, financial metrics must be a constraint). It's not the only factor (incentives get whacky, bureaucracy is difficult), but it's a factor which isn't appreciated as much as the other two.
It'd be nice if they could give me a compelling reason to upgrade my computer more than once or twice a decade, other than 'Our new AI computers have keyboards that go to 11'.
A company serves three groups.

Customers, employees, and owners.

I don't have a strong opinion about whether customers or employees come first, but owners should be last.

How could you have a strong opinion on what ought to be, when you've only baselessly asserted what is. Hume wept.
"The Shareholder Value Myth" is an interesting book about companies purpose https://www.amazon.com/The-Shareholder-Value-Myth-Shareholde...
I think with this kind of leadership they should probably liquidate and return money to the stockholders.
> What other expectations do you have of Intel?

I expect them to follow the Silicon Valley maxim of "Build the best product instead of focusing on making the most amount of money".

Beatings to continue..