>> The only mystery to me was why Intel never just sucked it up and made a low-margin x86 chip to compete directly with ARM. > Culture. Some companies are will

>> The only mystery to me was why Intel never just sucked it up and made a low-margin x86 chip to compete directly with ARM. > Culture. Some companies are willing to sacrifice today's revenue for tomorrow's growth. Intel isn't. Exactly. A tale as old as time; IBM is addicted to high-margin mainframes, ignores low-margin minicomputers, gets their lunch eaten by Digital. Digital is addicted to minicomputers, ignores PCs, lunch eaten by Apple, Commodore and, quelle ironie, IBM. Microsoft is addicted to the desktop platform, ignores web and mobile, left in the dust by Google and (irony again) Apple. Sometimes it's not even so much a margin thing as simply being unable to visualize alternative ways of making revenue. Missing link in the previous paragraph is Microsoft eating IBM/Apple/Commodore's lunch when they failed to see that software was an even greater profit opportunity than hardware. Xerox famously ignored the steady stream of insanely lucrative guaranteed mondo profit cash cows produced at PARC because management didn't understand any business besides selling copiers. Excite turned down a chance to acquire Google for $700,000.