There are absolutely staggering amounts of waste in large, especially market dominating, companies. Mainly because they can afford it... for a while. The diff

There are absolutely staggering amounts of waste in large, especially market dominating, companies. Mainly because they can afford it... for a while. The difference with most smaller, and even mid-sized, companies is that if they made even a fraction of the number and size mistakes (and I'm only talking in relative, rather than absolute, terms) that large companies do they would be bankrupt in a year or two. Large companies typically have momentum and either very large (i.e. other large companies and governments) or very large numbers (i.e. many 10's or 100's of millions of consumers) of customers who are slow to change. (Intel has both) It will often be years before catastrophic mistakes will even be acknowledged and even longer before the company is irreversibly impacted by them. As a result, you can pack in people for years who really have no business being there without immediate negative impact. While people would likely disagree on the exact ratio in a given company, it's far worse than you would ever imagine. The inevitable eventually happens: they cease being able to make (or make very well) the very product(s) they're known for. Occasionally companies will get shocked back to life as they see it all slipping away. More commonly they just wither and die as they are unable or unwilling to change the culture that got them to that point. Do I believe 1:40? If anything, I think that might be a conservative number at this point. Intel has become tragically/comically incompetent.