6 ms·

"It's just too late to turn them around" is pretty much what people said about Apple when Steve Jobs returned, though (in fact, it's more or less what I thought

"It's just too late to turn them around" is pretty much what people said about Apple when Steve Jobs returned, though (in fact, it's more or less what I thought as well). As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation", and likewise, big companies generally get more opportunities to reinvent themselves than one would expect.

shredprez 6y ago
> As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation" Tired brain read this as "there's a great deal in a ruin of a nation." Close enough, I guess?
- kwertyoowiyop 6y ago
  Must have been reading the news while typing it!
- microtherion 6y ago
  That would make a truly horrifying business book: "The Art of the Deal of Ruin in a Nation"
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    Evidently, 40% of people would buy it.
somethoughts 6y ago
Similarly some (many?) thought Microsoft was a lost cause due to Ballmer (sales/business development background), but they seem to be doing okay under Nadella (engineering background). That said, only time will tell.
- caycep 6y ago
  I think the telling thing is would you see a Nadella (and indeed, a Jobs)-like pivot when he takes over. i.e. axe old design/business models that don't work and fully embrace new ones.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Intel's problem isn't really that they're involved in too many businesses that don't make sense or they aren't good at. Their core businesses are still their core competencies. The problem has been a catastrophic set of execution misfires.
    - caycep 6y ago
      The question in my mind - even if Intel executes on its core competencies, has the market and its' structures moved on to make their vertical setup obsolete?
2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
How often do big companies like Apple and Intel succeed in righting a sinking ship though? You can’t keep pointing to the one guy that succeeded.
- hugocbp 6y ago
  Maybe classifying Intel as a sinking ship may be too much of an exaggeration. Competitors maybe passed them in the last couple of years, but Intel is still in a really solid position to turn things around. Apple's situation was a lot more dramatic. Intel still has a very good market share and can probably take a couple+ years to safely get back on track, in my opinion.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Yeah, absolutely. There's still a lot of excellent engineering being done at Intel that you can't find elsewhere. It's not like Apple where their core product had eroded into irrelevance, they were making tons of undifferentiated products and they literally had nothing of value except the dying embers of fan loyalty to sustain them. Amongst other things: - SGX is really far ahead of AMD SEV. The latter is probably easier to sell because it's marketed as "drop in" (encrypts whole VMs), but SEV has been repeatedly hacked or shipped with obvious gaping design holes that they patch later and call features. SGX is a lot more focused, a lot more flexible and frankly a lot more secure. - Optane NVRAM is completely unique, as far as I know. It's only 10x slower than DRAM which is nothing, but it's persistent! It totally changes the whole IO hierarchy. - AVX512 / DLBoost are able to hold their own against mid-range GPUs for some AI tasks, which is impressive and useful. - Their core chips are still very fast. AMD chips are selling more for less, which is a good position for them to be in, and TSMC's process advantage is helping them out for now. But they don't have a truly massive edge in tech like Apple's competitors had when Jobs returned. - Intel have a long tail of obscure features that AMD doesn't, although it's often hard to know this. SGX and AVX512 are high profile but there are others that are less well known. I don't count side channels as an issue because it's also an issue for all their competitors, and frankly I found the near single-minded focus on Intel by the security community to be rather misleading. I even read a side channels paper that admitted they suspected AMD had the same problem but they didn't bother to check simply because they didn't have access to any AMD hardware in the first place, which was unusually honest. Apple's M1 is very impressive in its space, but for high performance cases like servers it's only quad-core - you can't use the little low power cores for much. Apple have shown no interest in making server parts for a long time, and Apple's engineering is bespoke so it tells us nothing about what other ARM vendors can do. So in that space it's still just AMD vs Intel and Intel is a long way from being on its back yet.

shredprez 6y ago

> As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation" Tired brain read this as "there's a great deal in a ruin of a nation." Close enough, I guess?

kwertyoowiyop 6y ago
Must have been reading the news while typing it!
microtherion 6y ago
That would make a truly horrifying business book: "The Art of the Deal of Ruin in a Nation"
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Evidently, 40% of people would buy it.

somethoughts 6y ago

Similarly some (many?) thought Microsoft was a lost cause due to Ballmer (sales/business development background), but they seem to be doing okay under Nadella (engineering background). That said, only time will tell.

caycep 6y ago
I think the telling thing is would you see a Nadella (and indeed, a Jobs)-like pivot when he takes over. i.e. axe old design/business models that don't work and fully embrace new ones.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Intel's problem isn't really that they're involved in too many businesses that don't make sense or they aren't good at. Their core businesses are still their core competencies. The problem has been a catastrophic set of execution misfires.
  - caycep 6y ago
    The question in my mind - even if Intel executes on its core competencies, has the market and its' structures moved on to make their vertical setup obsolete?

2muchcoffeeman 6y ago

How often do big companies like Apple and Intel succeed in righting a sinking ship though? You can’t keep pointing to the one guy that succeeded.

hugocbp 6y ago
Maybe classifying Intel as a sinking ship may be too much of an exaggeration. Competitors maybe passed them in the last couple of years, but Intel is still in a really solid position to turn things around. Apple's situation was a lot more dramatic. Intel still has a very good market share and can probably take a couple+ years to safely get back on track, in my opinion.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Yeah, absolutely. There's still a lot of excellent engineering being done at Intel that you can't find elsewhere. It's not like Apple where their core product had eroded into irrelevance, they were making tons of undifferentiated products and they literally had nothing of value except the dying embers of fan loyalty to sustain them. Amongst other things: - SGX is really far ahead of AMD SEV. The latter is probably easier to sell because it's marketed as "drop in" (encrypts whole VMs), but SEV has been repeatedly hacked or shipped with obvious gaping design holes that they patch later and call features. SGX is a lot more focused, a lot more flexible and frankly a lot more secure. - Optane NVRAM is completely unique, as far as I know. It's only 10x slower than DRAM which is nothing, but it's persistent! It totally changes the whole IO hierarchy. - AVX512 / DLBoost are able to hold their own against mid-range GPUs for some AI tasks, which is impressive and useful. - Their core chips are still very fast. AMD chips are selling more for less, which is a good position for them to be in, and TSMC's process advantage is helping them out for now. But they don't have a truly massive edge in tech like Apple's competitors had when Jobs returned. - Intel have a long tail of obscure features that AMD doesn't, although it's often hard to know this. SGX and AVX512 are high profile but there are others that are less well known. I don't count side channels as an issue because it's also an issue for all their competitors, and frankly I found the near single-minded focus on Intel by the security community to be rather misleading. I even read a side channels paper that admitted they suspected AMD had the same problem but they didn't bother to check simply because they didn't have access to any AMD hardware in the first place, which was unusually honest. Apple's M1 is very impressive in its space, but for high performance cases like servers it's only quad-core - you can't use the little low power cores for much. Apple have shown no interest in making server parts for a long time, and Apple's engineering is bespoke so it tells us nothing about what other ARM vendors can do. So in that space it's still just AMD vs Intel and Intel is a long way from being on its back yet.