[acroyear]

Mr. Magoo-ism galore.

Intel had constantly try to bring in visionaries, but failed over and over. With the exception of Jim Keller, Intel was duped into believing in incompetent people. At a critical juncture during the smart-phone revolution it was Mike Bell, a full-on Mr. Magoo. He never did anything after his stint with Intel worth mentioning - he was exposed as a pretender. Eric Kim would be another. Murthy Renduchintala is another. It goes on and on. Also critical was the the failure of an in-house exec named Anand Chandrasekher who completely flubbed the mega-project coop between Intel and Nokia to bring about Moblin OS and create a third phone ecosystem to the marketplace. WHY would Anand be put in charge of such an important effort?????? In Intel's defense, this project was submarined by Nokia's Stephen Elop, who usurped their CEO and left Intel standing at the altar. (Elop was a former Microsoft exec, Microsoft was also working on their foray into smartphones at the time. . very suspicious). XScale was mis-handled, Intel had a working phone with XScale prior to the iPhone being release .. but Intel was afraid of fostering a development community outside of x86 (Balmer once chanted -> developer, developer, developer). My guess is that ultimately, Intel suffers from the Kodak conundrum, i.e. they have probably rejected true visionaries because their ideas would always threaten the sacred cash cows. They have been afraid to innovate at the expense of profit margins (short term thinkers).

[AtlasBarfed]

Interesting to me is that Intel was constantly shedding people in 2008 and 2009 with high revenues, high market share, tech leads, etc.

Smacks of financialization and wall-street centric managerial groupthink, rather than having the talented engineers to fight the coming mobile wars which were already very very apparent (thus the Atom), or even the current war of failure in discrete graphics.

Once the MBAs gain control of a dynamic technology company (I saw it at Medtronic personally), the technology and talent soul of the company is on a ticking timer of death. Medtronic turned into a acquire-tech-and-products-via buyout/acquisition rather than in-house, and Intel was also a treadmill of acquire-destroy (at least from my perspective Medtronic sometimes acquired companies and they became successful product lines, but Intel always seemed clueless in executing their acquisitions.

I look at all the 2000s acquisitions of Intel: sure shows they were "trying" at mobile, in the "signal wall street we are trying by acquiring companies so we keep our executive positions" but zero about actually chasing what mobile needed: low power, high performance.

[acroyear]

shedding ppl in the USA, yes. bringing on hordes of cheap engineers from India and Malaysia at the same time though. labor arbitrage was probably MBA-think as well, to your point. (also, Intel was sued along with other big wheels for collusion, i.e. agreeing not to hire from one another in the US to keep salaries down - they settled this class action suit). managed demolition of a once great company.

[thijson]

Someone I knew that worked there said that the CPU business was like a giant tree, no other business could grow because of its shade. I remember Mike Bell was leading the x86 phone project, and later wearables. I thought an interesting data point is that he ended up at Rivian, but didn't last long there. A lot of the hype around him was that he kept claiming credit for the iPhone. He would threaten to leave Intel, and then Otellini would throw more money at him.

[kevvok]

> Murthy Renduchintala

He was a joke at Qualcomm before he went to Intel too. That Intel considered snagging him a coup was a consistent source of amusement.

[brcmthrowaway]

Is Raja Koduri another phony?

[acroyear]

I don't know tbh, heard both good and bad things .. he was brought in after many of the problems had already become serious. He probably had a very difficult charter.