If Intel's moat made them fall behind, it was by lulling the company into a false sense of security allowing the bean counters to take over and under-invest in

If Intel's moat made them fall behind, it was by lulling the company into a false sense of security allowing the bean counters to take over and under-invest in keeping up with everyone else in the all-important foundry space. Maybe that's the thesis, but if so it misattributes the cause. The cause is the same MBA-brain thinking that destroyed General Electric and Boeing. The root error in this thinking is to get behind a spreadsheet and completely abstract away all human and physical realities. There's now just units, COGS, gross margin, etc., and so you just optimize those levers to maximize the KPIs the stock market cares about with zero regard for the effect it has on the actual machine or its long term trajectory in the space it operates within. It's really the same set of fallacies that lie behind command economics at the national scale. MBA-brain doesn't work for the same reason centralized authoritarian communism doesn't work. It's the same abstraction away of details, the same optimization without regard for reality, the same hollow experts in "leadership" that aren't really experts in anything. Apparatchiks with no understanding of what's actually happening on the ground can't run things.