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From the article: Piednoel didn’t spare words for Intel’s culture, which he said has changed drastically and promotes MBAs over those with technical prowess. T

From the article: Piednoel didn’t spare words for Intel’s culture, which he said has changed drastically and promotes MBAs over those with technical prowess. The current CEO is a finance / MBA type, so it's no surprise that the current culture favors that. In Intel's defense, the previous CEO was a process engineer. But, unfortunately, he couldn't keep his weiner in his pants. He also was probably the wrong choice as CEO since, under his watch, Intel process development apparently went to shit. Oh, well. Intel was a great company for many years. Perhaps it will reinvent itself.

BeetleB 6y ago
The previous CEO, who was a process engineer, was the one who brought the current CEO to Intel. It is widely believed the reasons for his firing were merely a pretext - they felt he was performing poorly and wanted to find an excuse to get rid of him. His focus definitely wasn't on CPUs - just look at all the acquisitions under his watch, and the focus away from CPUs into everything else (AI, autonomous vehicles, etc). He also sold all the stock he conceivably could during his tenure: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/04/intel-ceo-reportedly-sold-shares-after-the-company-already-knew-about-massive-security-flaws.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/04/intel-ceo-reportedly-sold-sh...
- dijit 6y ago
  The previous CEO was trying to diversify the company because CPU dominance has diminishing returns. Obviously this has backfired tremendously, as we now see the rise of ARM in the processor space and even AMD to conquer x86. But intel still make the best consumer networking cards! For whatever that is worth.
  - duhast 6y ago
    > But intel still make the best consumer networking cards! For whatever that is worth. Could you be more specific?
nine_k 6y ago
As somebody noted, when you have cornered a large part of the market, you don't feel as much technical pressure, and success in selling becomes key. So sales and MBAs start to run the show, because it makes the business sense, and while doing so risk to lose the sight of the technological advances that made the dominant position possible. Intel's founder, Andy Grove, used to say: "Only the paranoid survive". (He personally survived under a false identity in Nazi-occupied Hungary.) I'm afraid Intel had stopped being paranoid enough before it started to stumble more and more seriously.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  This seems to be a reasonable explanation. Even with sales and MBAs running the show, they know that they will always need something competitive to sell. For the longest time Intel relied on shrinking dies and single-threaded performance advantage. They didn't continue to race ahead with shrinking and as noted AVX-512 is not the hit to save them. They need more but may have misjudged that or believed too much of their own sales/marketing lacking sufficient paranoia. The future will be more consumer appliance-like devices rather than PC-like products. I would much rather use a laptop/OS that suspended/resumed like an iPad with low power consumption (cool/quiet) and extended battery life. Apple has a way to this future. AMD can run on servers and gaming rigs. Intel needs something like a ChromeOS or Fuchsia to do everything (a cloud desktop rather than a browser) to be mainstream. I would use Clear Linux if it was more than an academic experiment--had a good desktop and repos that had a maintained useful fraction of Ubuntu packages (i.e. packages are up to date, used, have good defaults, etc).
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    What happened to Tizen?
  - nine_k 6y ago
    I find Clear Linux quite nice, but I don't know if it could replace the lost CPU revenue :-\
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
redis_mlc 6y ago
> But, unfortunately, he couldn't keep his weiner in his pants. My understanding is that he met his first wife while they both worked at Intel, but that was in a different era. Meeting your spouse at work used to be a common thing. What you're referring to is more recent, but it's hard to fault the guy when Intel didn't say anything the previous time. > Piednoel didn’t spare words for Intel’s culture, which he said has changed drastically and promotes MBAs As organizations grow, nobody is left with a thread of understanding across departments of what is made. That alone can explain what happened at both Intel and Boeing. Unfortunately, anybody who does connect that thread, even before a looming disaster, will be labelled a naysayer, with no upside to them personally.
JSavageOne 6y ago
Same thing happened to Boeing, didn't turn out well

BeetleB 6y ago

The previous CEO, who was a process engineer, was the one who brought the current CEO to Intel. It is widely believed the reasons for his firing were merely a pretext - they felt he was performing poorly and wanted to find an excuse to get rid of him. His focus definitely wasn't on CPUs - just look at all the acquisitions under his watch, and the focus away from CPUs into everything else (AI, autonomous vehicles, etc). He also sold all the stock he conceivably could during his tenure: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/04/intel-ceo-reportedly-sold-shares-after-the-company-already-knew-about-massive-security-flaws.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/04/intel-ceo-reportedly-sold-sh...

dijit 6y ago
The previous CEO was trying to diversify the company because CPU dominance has diminishing returns. Obviously this has backfired tremendously, as we now see the rise of ARM in the processor space and even AMD to conquer x86. But intel still make the best consumer networking cards! For whatever that is worth.
- duhast 6y ago
  > But intel still make the best consumer networking cards! For whatever that is worth. Could you be more specific?

nine_k 6y ago

As somebody noted, when you have cornered a large part of the market, you don't feel as much technical pressure, and success in selling becomes key. So sales and MBAs start to run the show, because it makes the business sense, and while doing so risk to lose the sight of the technological advances that made the dominant position possible. Intel's founder, Andy Grove, used to say: "Only the paranoid survive". (He personally survived under a false identity in Nazi-occupied Hungary.) I'm afraid Intel had stopped being paranoid enough before it started to stumble more and more seriously.

karmakaze 6y ago
This seems to be a reasonable explanation. Even with sales and MBAs running the show, they know that they will always need something competitive to sell. For the longest time Intel relied on shrinking dies and single-threaded performance advantage. They didn't continue to race ahead with shrinking and as noted AVX-512 is not the hit to save them. They need more but may have misjudged that or believed too much of their own sales/marketing lacking sufficient paranoia. The future will be more consumer appliance-like devices rather than PC-like products. I would much rather use a laptop/OS that suspended/resumed like an iPad with low power consumption (cool/quiet) and extended battery life. Apple has a way to this future. AMD can run on servers and gaming rigs. Intel needs something like a ChromeOS or Fuchsia to do everything (a cloud desktop rather than a browser) to be mainstream. I would use Clear Linux if it was more than an academic experiment--had a good desktop and repos that had a maintained useful fraction of Ubuntu packages (i.e. packages are up to date, used, have good defaults, etc).
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  What happened to Tizen?
- nine_k 6y ago
  I find Clear Linux quite nice, but I don't know if it could replace the lost CPU revenue :-\
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

redis_mlc 6y ago

> But, unfortunately, he couldn't keep his weiner in his pants. My understanding is that he met his first wife while they both worked at Intel, but that was in a different era. Meeting your spouse at work used to be a common thing. What you're referring to is more recent, but it's hard to fault the guy when Intel didn't say anything the previous time. > Piednoel didn’t spare words for Intel’s culture, which he said has changed drastically and promotes MBAs As organizations grow, nobody is left with a thread of understanding across departments of what is made. That alone can explain what happened at both Intel and Boeing. Unfortunately, anybody who does connect that thread, even before a looming disaster, will be labelled a naysayer, with no upside to them personally.

JSavageOne 6y ago

Same thing happened to Boeing, didn't turn out well