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Intel’s board, and an example of when boards and short-termism fail
- morellt 2y ago[flagged]
- lincpa 2y ago[dead]
- jgrahamc 2y agoJames Goetz is a partner at Sequoia and joined the board in November 2019. He has previously served on networking-focused boards. He has a degree in electrical engineering, is likely semi-technical, and understands the industry. He’s relatively new but likely does not have a technical background. He’s been on the board long enough to be partially to blame. I crossed paths with Jim Goetz at Accel because of the company Vital Signs that he started. I am not sure why they say "but likely does not have a technical background" because I can attest that he clearly did. Weird.
- billjive 2y agoJim and I were on my company's board (Jive) and he absolutely has a technical background.
- SilverBirch 2y agoI think a lot of the analysis of Intel is just looking at a totally broken timeframe. Intel started having problems in early 2010s. It has been sliding since then. To fix it you need to clean house, get aligned on a good chain of management and engineering, then build out a roadmap that gets you back to process leadership and then execute on that roadmap. A year to sort out the organisation, a year to re-vamp the roadmap, probably 2-3 years to execute. Pat was probably the only person with the clout to ask for that time, and he didn't get it (and arguably he didn't really face the scale of the problem). The board failed, but it failed in 2010-2015, there's no point searching for someone to blame now, we're well past the point that the correct answer is to sell it for parts.
- AlexandrB 2y agoWhat's crazy about Intel's downfall is that Intel used a bunch of anticompetitive tactics to hamper AMD throughout the years and still couldn't keep them at bay long term. It's like a sports team that keeps cheating and still loses in the end.
- LarsDu88 2y agoHey who changed the title of this post?
- hedgehog 2y agoLet's not underestimate the complexity of the problem Gelsinger took on. I base that on the experience of selling them a company, and then having a little bit of a view from inside (under Bob Swan). It's clear to me that Gelsinger was trying to keep a lot of plates spinning while returning to former glory in an organization with a lot of cultural baggage doing work that is not amenable to clean sheet attempts. Messy. Post author is probably correct that PE-style chop & shop is the short-term most profitable approach, but it's also the worst outcome for almost everyone besides the largest shareholders. What I'm looking for in the next set of leadership is a clear, positive vision for the future + an acknowledgement of the systemic changes to the industry they're in (e.g. no longer have the dominant volume to give them a process leadership advantage). There's a lot they can do with tight integration, security, software platform, and product lifecycle that the smaller fabless players aren't able to (yet).
- 29athrowaway 2y agoMBAs are the ruin of America
- brutal_chaos_ 2y agoFabricated Knowledge
- dash2 2y agoJust one thing is missing from this excellent article: any explanation of why splitting up Intel, while it would “maximise shareholder value” is also “bad for America”. What’s America’s interest in having an integrated designer and manufacturer, rather than splitting the roles?
- LarsDu88 2y agoJust thought this article really drives home how a behemoth company like Intel in the midst of a turnaround can be completely kneecapped by a board of directors (virtually none of whom have any semiconductor experience!)
- scrubs 2y agoSee comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42321673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42321673 Re c-suite And for a positive counter example think Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (1993 - 2002) when ibm was in a jamb.
- trimbo 2y agoGerstner saved a brand name by destroying a tech company and making it a consulting company. I'm not sure the same is possible with Intel.
- Spivak 2y agoI think that undersells IBMs continued technical achievement in the mainframe space. It's a niche business but the folks who need it really need it. Sure fine it's not their growth sector, software (thanks mostly to RedHat), but they managed to keep a really cool and unique segment of engineering going despite commodity hardware eating the world.
- scrubs 2y agoGerstner left ibm far better than when he found it. That's the main point. Now generally speaking most American OEMs lost their manufacturing chops since 1985 when software began eating everything. Today, tech companies need to decide: did that go too far? Should we reincorporate physical r&d, and down size manufacturing supply chain bringing it back inside? Those are legit questions. Summarily stating ibm is just a consulting company doesn't get us anywhere.
- btilly 2y agoIBM had three problems at that point. The first was a culture of speaking to the expectations of senior executives, and following strategies that made no sense. The second was that they were on all sides of all technology disputes - and so everyone hated them. The third was that they were under an antitrust consent decree. Basic software expertise wasn't going to help with any of this. The third was going to solve itself in time. The second was good old accounting. The first, well, https://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post https://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post does a good job of describing what IBM was doing wrong. By the time Open Source became a thing, IBM clearly had figured it out. The golden rule is this, people are willing to pay a certain amount for a solution to their problems. People don't care how their budget is divided. So if the complement to your solution is open source, you can charge more for the proprietary bit. Better yet, the open source thing with a bunch of support has a better shot than a completely proprietary stack. So open source the complement to your real product. Gerstner somehow "got it". And it showed. This is why IBM supported Linux, Apache, etc in 1998/1999. Letting Microsoft lose the standards battles. But do I see you saying that standards are a software issue? Maybe, but they also mattered to American Express. Which is where he came from. So he was equipped to understand the issue.
- sitkack 2y agoMost bureaucratic woes can be attributed to abysmal board oversight, profit and non-profit alike.
- Loughla 2y agoAnd when CEO or presidents are allowed to snow the board via force of personality and (for lack of a better way to say it) good old boy mentality. I've lived through it at multiple organizations. It's the worst death for a company.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- buckle8017 2y agoIntel without a foundry has no strategic value to the people of the united states. Intel is pretty obviously dependent on taxpayer subsidies right now. So they're going to get rid of the foundry? Big brain plan over there.
- NortySpock 2y agoI was going to say, the fab is capital-intensive but at least has value as an asset so long as you can keep it printing out chips profitably, which is more likely in a trade war where certain foreign chips are banned... As for what chips you print on them... x86, ARM, RISC-V, GPUs, NPUs, RAM, FPGAs, PLAs, print whatever the market asks for... It's not like there's fundamental superior value in x86 as an intellectual property, just inertia. But local manufacturing gets protected in a trade war, because you'll need it if push comes to shove. Intellectual property just gets stolen and copied.
- henriquez 2y agoI’m sure the Intel board members will be drying their tears with hundred dollar bills when their assistants tell them about this article. I don’t remember a time when Intel either had a strategy or the strategy wasn’t short-sighted.
- njtransit 2y agoThere’s an implicit assumption in the article that, because Gelsinger was technically competent, he was going to be a great CEO of given enough time. Personally, I’ve heard nothing but bad things from Intel during Gelsinger’s tenure. He had some lofty ideas, but he clearly wasn’t executing well with Intel’s bread and butter business. Also, I’m not sure good engineers always make good managers. Management is all about delegation. The skillset is really about identifying talent and trusting them to do things competently so you don’t have to worry about the details. That’s pretty much the antithesis of engineering, where you like thinking through the specific details of how things will work. And of course, engineering is only one part of brining products to market.
- adrian_b 2y agoI have followed Intel's products closely. While they suck enough that there have passed more than 5 years since I have bought for the last time Intel CPUs (but before that I had spent a lot of money on Intel CPUs and other products), I have not seen any problem that can be attributed directly to Pat Gelsinger. Unlike most companies, Intel publishes relatively detailed roadmaps with years in advance. Since Pat Gelsinger has become CEO, all those roadmaps have been accomplished in time, even if the products have not been as good as they could have been, due to things like low clock frequencies for any new fabrication process at launch (but this is a problem that has plagued Intel for the entirety of the last 10 years) or high intercommunication latencies for the first Intel multi-tile CPUs, like Sapphire Rapids and Arrow Lake, which can be attributed to an unavoidable lack of experience with such designs (because the former Intel management has delayed for too many years the transition to such designs, with jokes about the "glued" CPUs of the competition). According to the roadmaps published years ago, the recent years have been intended as transitional years, with the first really competitive Intel products being launched only in the second half of 2025. Only then it would have been possible to judge correctly whether Pat Gelsinger had done a good job or a bad job as CEO. As outsiders, we do not have enough information about what Pat Gelsinger has done. The roadmaps have been reasonable, the main thing that could be criticized is that there have been too many intermediate steps before reaching desirable products. However, it is likely that Intel could not have sustained financially a more abrupt transition. Even with this slower transition that has included the launch of many intermediate products intended to avoid a collapse of the sales, the financial losses have been high enough that they have been used as an excuse to eject Pat Gelsinger. It seems that Pat Gelsinger did not have the power to do a real cleanup of the Intel managers, especially of those from the fabs. For years many of those managers must have lied continuously both to other Intel divisions and in the public presentations. There is no public information that any of those managers have suffered adequate consequences for their actions. Also, it does not seem that he has succeeded to improve the internal cooperation between various Intel divisions. Some internal competition is good, but withholding information and lack of cooperation is bad. At Intel, too many products appear to have been developed independently by different teams, instead of all teams sharing some common designs as a base for their products.
- kk032 2y agoIn their defense its a complex world. Its easy to focus on people and forget about how complex the environment they operate in has become. And the complexity is increasing not decreasing. Google C-Suite turnover rates and the downward trend they have been on for the last few decades. In Tech and Finance C-Suite its super steep. The famous ones are outliers and mostly figure heads. Behind the scenes there is constant chaotic churn.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoYeah and this space is about as complex as it gets. That being said, they have screwed a lot of things up. But even if they executed perfectly they might be in approximately the same spot.
- rvba 2y agoWorking at Boeing, GE... should be like a kiss of death - permanent ban on any work related to shareholder value
- bdangubic 2y agoit is a publicly-traded company though, and if they are not working towards increasing shareholder value the investors will bolt and then how are you gonna pay your bills? :) nationalizing might be a way but the government will run it and that always works out…
- LarsDu88 2y agoIntel should have someone like Jim Keller on the board. Maybe even software folks like Chris Lattner. Not Boeing, GE, merger and acquisition clowns.
- jiggawatts 2y agoHe was there in 2020! He left after something like 3 months because he couldn't get buy-in for his ideas from senior management, most probably the board of directors: https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/z3set6/jim_keller_apparently_left_intel_2020_because_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/z3set6/jim_keller_ap...
- sgerenser 2y ago
- airstrike 2y agoAfter almost a decade advising on large cap M&A in Wall Street, my biggest takeaway is that activist investors play a fundamental role in capital markets. I think a lot of the hate they get is fabricated by the status quo in PR wars. If I were considering going back to M&A, that gig would be at the top of my list. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen activists clamoring for this board to be replaced. Maybe it's too late for Intel and nobody has the stomach and stamina to try to turn it around when there's easier money to be made in a very favorable environment. Or maybe it's too early and an activist is indeed slowly buying up a position but hasn't hit the threshold after which they must disclose their stake.
- crowcroft 2y agoThe cycles are so long that I think it's hard for activists to get in, set a new course and exit with a profit. Having said that the stock is so low at this point something will probably happen. I think private equity taking it private for 5-10 years would let the company work through a long term turn around. Similar to what's happened with Yahoo. PE could buy it, spin out/sell the most distracting adjacent parts of the business, and then focus the core business over the next five years without needing to publicly deliver quarterly updates. It would be a massive PE deal, but not outside the realms of possibility, especially if the stock drops a few more percent.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoI have been a consistent critic of Intel on here. But a company like Intel can't be spun up/replaced on anything less than even more subsidies and probably 10 years of nondelivery/noncompetitiveness. A chip foundry and chip design of this level takes a long time to reach competence. Hell, if you are 1 generation behind status quo, Intel shows it can take 3 years to catch up, if then. This company isn't a struggling retailer in a sea of retailers (Sears) or some rando restaurant chain selling potato skins, blooming onions, and nachos (TGIFridays). This is a top-line chip fabricator, in a geopolitical environment where supply lines/shipping lines are under threat in the Pacific, demographic collapses in China, Japan, and South Korea are underway, and a president that wants to start a tariff war. National security concerns underline Intels importance. It isn't some chopshop private equity spreadsheet play. If you split it you need functional mission-based companies. Intel has something like a dozen fabs. I would subdivide those into the lines of business their process nodes can serve, from embedded / industrial stuff, board chipsets, whatever. Identify the process nodes desperately needed for economic protection from a hostile/collapsing China (same thing basically in economic impact). We need state of the art, so the latest and n-1 fabs get wrapped up, but we likely need a boatload of second and third tier node production as well. I think Intel's fabs can be split in the n-2 and n-3 nodes into two competing companies, because the US doesn't need monopolies, it needs competition, and that will be the path to far better utilization of subsidies and speeding up production independence from the Asian rim. I cannot believe Intel has failed at integrated graphics for so long. I'd like a competitor to NVidia besides AMD. Setting up functional subsidiaries like this will absolutely not happen with private equity chopshops, all run by the same financial illusionists that have crushed Intel and Boeing. But that's not how the oligarchy works. It'll be something that maximizes concentration of the subsidy check by the same incompetents that "manage" Intel right now, and the subsidy will be squandered. I cannot believe a Boeing fuckhead is now the interim CEO. Nothing will go well, these people are survivalist lizards that care about their careers and stock options and parachutes. That Boeing guy likely engineered the ousting, he's a slimy survivor of corporate Machiavellianism. I invite him to prove me wrong, the country needs it.
- llsf 2y agoIs it time for Elon Musk to step in, or is it too early ? Now with the CHIPs money coming in, it might be the right time...
- claaams 2y agoBy asking musk to step in are you talking about having him make the company worth 10% of what it’s worth now?
- llsf 2y agoNot worrying about the worth of the company as much, but more to salvage the chip maker expertise that Intel still has (Intel has been in several rounds of layoffs, including 15,000 in 2024). According to the article, splitting Intel would be good (short term) for the shareholders, bad long term, and bad for the country. Intel is still a great asset, but it looks like it is losing its appeal as time passes. CEO of Intel is deemed to be a very challenging position. The board does not seem to know how to turn the ship around. I could see Musk steering that ship. It is technically challenging (Musk seems to thrive in those environments), and it could even benefit the other Musk companies to some extent (XAi, Tesla and even maybe SpaceX). Intel market cap is 94.713B (AMD is 233B, ARM Holdings is 144B... not mentioning NVIDIA), so about twice what Musk paid for Twitter. But if Musk sets his view on Intel, he would not have a hard time to finance the purchase. Actually, he could wait a bit more as the stock can fall even more (today, Intel stock is at the price of Dec. 1996). This is armchair talking/joke, and it would be one more crazy thing on the 2024 bingo card, but from all the crazy things we have seen recently, Musk taking over Intel would look quite normal in comparison.
- BobbyTables2 2y agoWe’re going to need a bigger bingo card for 2025…
- impossiblefork 2y agoMaybe if he owned the whole thing and could run it as he liked, without having to care about the stock price or paying money to investors, but personally I don't think anyone can do it while also satisfying the stock market. I'm not sure Musk is especially qualified either, except that he could afford it.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoVote me down to the 9th circle of hell, but I find the article is simply off with the fairies. What do boards, directors, companies, capital, investors or any of the self-important suit-wearing dog and pony show have to do with what's happening to Intel? Intel is dying because it simply cannot bring itself to make a product that people want instead of the things it thinks people want [0].That's its fundamental life-preserving responsibility to itself. Sure, semiconductor making is very cut-off from the reality of what it makes tech for. But mindless progress for the sake of progress? It's a headless chicken running about the farmyard. The basics of business still apply. Make stuff people ask you for. [0] https://techrights.org/n/2024/12/04/Technology_rights_or_responsibilities_Part_IX.shtml https://techrights.org/n/2024/12/04/Technology_rights_or_res...
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago> Intel is dying because it simply cannot bring itself to make a product that people want instead of the things it thinks people want [0]. Not sure that the link adequately makes its case. The number of people that actually care about Intel Management Engine is extremely small. Intel's real problem is that their products have struggled to be competitive in the marketplace on a price and performance level.
- hakfoo 2y agoI could see a case for "we'll sell a few narrow SKUs of non-ME products for an audience that demands it" -- assuming there are some people who will vote with their pockets for it. It's probably up there with some of the other corner-cases in their product matrix. But I agree, that's noise. There are much bigger problems with their product line: * Adding and removing features (especially AVX, but also the whole market-segmentation nonsense with ECC memory) * The marginal and in some cases negative generation-over-generation performance boosts. * The unlocked wattage situation which screams "we're pushing an end-of-the-rope product that we can only get to decent clocks by feeding it an entire mains circuit". (See: FX-9590, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition) Intel might be able to say "Today's Glysophate Lake CPU is clearly better than the Haswell you bought 10 years ago", but there will be a lot of mumbling if you ask "how much better is it than last year's Paraquat Lake". That doesn't inspire confidence, especially when they have traditionally been the premium brand.
- etempleton 2y agoThe board’s lack of technical or even product expertise struck me when it was announced Gelsinger would abruptly retire. They don’t have the chops to be the wartime board Intel needs. They likely have no idea if Gelsinger was on the right path or chasing a dream. I believe Gelsinger was the right person for the job, but the board wasn’t and isn’t. The board would have had to approve of his plans. They should have known what they were signing up for. For Gelsinger’s part he was probably too cavalier with finances and market sentiment to ever sustain any political capital.
- passwordoops 2y agoNot just let of technical experience, but the experience they do have is scary. Gregory Smith, for example, who is "the former CFO and EVP of operations at Boeing. He’s been on the board since 2017 and was an interim CEO at Boeing during 2020...probably be directly involved with the Boeing fiasco." Someone like that should be facing criminal negligence charges, not sitting on boards.
- nimish 2y agoTruly a comical choice for a board member
- lordnacho 2y agoIt's an indictment of the capitalist system. There's supposed to be oversight that ensure our organizations are run by capable people. But you look at this board (and I'm sure a few others) and it's clear they are not worth the money they are paid. What is anyone even thinking, having a guy from Boeing there? The board is also too big, and filled with irrelevant people. Four or five specialists who know the area, and one or two financial side people, that's all you need. Too many chefs = nobody's cooking, nobody is responsible.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago> It's an indictment of the capitalist system. Do you have any evidence, that any other system, has demonstrated historical immunity to this problem? Last I checked, the Soviet system put some awfully unqualified people in charge of nuclear plants, and we know how that went. Last I checked, China put some awfully unqualified people in charge of the housing market, and we know how that's going. The correct response is that unqualified people in positions of power has plagued every social structure. Arguably, alternative systems have failed in this regard to even worse degrees, with far more catastrophic outcomes.
- klelatti 2y agoI’m not sure how it’s possible to come to a firm view on this decision on the basis of the information that is now public. For example whilst there has been apparent technical progress eg on 18A - which is central to Gelsingers track record - it will mean nothing without IFS customers. It wouldn’t take a technical background to evaluate whether Intel is making progress in actually signing firms up for IFS. Will technical progress continue without Gelsinger - surely yes. But a new CEO might also deal with issues that he was clearly slow to such as costs and getting rid of products that are going nowhere.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoSurely yes? Intel has been a company of engineering underdelivery and incompetence for a decade now. Huge bonuses and pay to financial management, salary reductions and cheapness on the labor side, your classic American MBA war-on-labor. The fact they cannot deliver a GPU, which is just a big vector processing array fundamentally, has been the long running sign of Intel's incompetence, something they should have had literally 25 years ago when Apples had vector processors and the first 3D accelerators were hitting the PC gaming world. The intellectual talent long fled Intel, and they didn't invest in replacement intellectual talent. Because MBAs don't respect "talent". They tolerate it for some function of tolerance, and generally the "dead sea effect" is imposed as talent leaves and the managers let the structure rot rather than fix it. Gelsinger obviously didn't have time to fix the intellectual and talent rot, because he probably needed to eliminate three levels of vice presidents to start with. I really celebrate the article's approach. The arrival of massive CEO pay, allegedly because of how important, public, and critical their positions are, never actually comes with detailing of who is in charge and the effect of their decisions. Why do the major heads of petroleum companies, cigarette companies, and other managerial structures largely get to destroy their companies or the world in the anonymity of private org charts?
- tester756 2y ago>The fact they cannot deliver a GPU, Their recent GPUs are decent, wdym?
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- someonehere 2y agoFor some reason when Apple moved to their own SOC I knew this would be one of the nails in the death of the company. A few other blunders on their part and here we are.
- Reason077 2y ago> "he (was) the most technically competent CEO of the last few bad apples at Intel, but he was also among the shortest" Is this article suggesting that Pat Gelsinger may have lost his job in part because he's shorter compared to other typical "CEO types"? Are we still subconsciously judging people based on their height in 2024? Sad if true, and if not true, then it's an odd thing for the article to point out. (Bezos is pretty short too, isn't he?)
- buckle8017 2y agoIs this a joke? He's talking about the length of his tenure.
- ojbyrne 2y agoThe word “tenure” was left out. It took me a second to guess that.
- renewedrebecca 2y agoI’m going to go with shortest as in length of time he was in the job.
- LarsDu88 2y agoI think this was a typo. He had the shortest tenure at 5 years. He wasn't the physically shortest guy. Intel greatest ceo Andy Grove may not have been particularly tall... spent his childhood as a malnourished holocaust survivor
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoIs Pat ok? Everyone’s talking about how it’s terrible to force pat out but he started posting very out of context bible quotes to twitter starting in August this year and continued posting since. There’s been no word of personal health issues but it did seem like a sudden change.
- douglee650 2y agoIs this guy short INTC, yes or no. The rest is color commentary
- porknubbins 2y agoAs a shareholder who lost quite a bit I was angry at Gelsinger. But now after reading this article I feel sorry for him as someone who by all appearances tried to do a very hard thing and just came up short and got pushed out by the board. Loss of a lot of performance crowns to AMD and 13th and 14th gen cpu failure problems were big black marks on his watch but its not certain that anyone else would have done better and I never doubted his commitment to the job at hand. Maybe what Intel needs is a whole culture shift to get rid of the bureaucratization and HR-ization and Gelsinger was not ruthless enough in removing calcified middle management layers and thought he could save Intel with technical achievements alone and avoid a lot of human suffering.
- tgma 2y agoI have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, Intel as we knew it, a technical powerhouse, who kicked ass and delivered the Moore's law, would likely have been best served by someone like Pat than the alternatives. However, the world may have changed and the real value of Intel going forward may be the national security aspect of it. If Intel is becoming a Lockheed Martin, perhaps you want a capital allocator more than a technologist at the helm.
- ulfw 2y agoWhat national security? Huh? What do you have in mind for intel to be going forward?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BeetleB 2y agoFabs. The only other major players are Samsung and TSMC, with the latter being the giant. If China invades Taiwan, they control the bulk of the semiconductor supply.
- marcyb5st 2y agoThe rumors say TSMC fabs are designed to self-destruct if China takes control of them. I don't know if that is true, but even if it wasn't I suspect that the US would destroy them instead of letting China have them. China having a de-facto monopoly on semiconductors production is a serious problem for the US until new fabs will be available elsewhere. In fact, not only they can prioritize domestic military/AI development leapfrogging the US giving enough time, but they can provide high tech components to the likes of Russia, Iran, North Korea. And the US wouldn't be able to retaliate as China could simply levy taxes or bans semiconductors exports to the US and whoever sells to them (similar to what the US is doing with Russia after the war in Ukraine started). So I expect that, as soon as an hypothetical invasion of Taiwan looks like it's gonna succeed, those fabs will be reduced to dust.
- zoky 2y ago> His brief stint of 1386 days was surprising because not only was he the most technically competent CEO of the last few bad apples at Intel, but he was also among the shortest. Well, how tall is he? And why does it matter? The article never actually says.
- LarsDu88 2y agoI'm pretty sure that was a typo. Short tenure, not short stature
- challenger-derp 2y agowould be helpful if I could get assistance with the paywall – I could be wrong, but I'm assuming a sizeable handful of commenters in this section managed to read this paywalled article?
- h_tbob 2y agoThis may sound weird but I think the CHIPS act tempted intel to overextend. Counterintuitively they may even have been better without the money. i don’t think problem was never lack of manufacturing capacity. I think it was process tech. So I think the free govt money tempted them to invest in something that wasn’t mission critical - old node capacity, when they really needed r&d
- rapsey 2y agoIt was announced a few days ago that Intel is finally going to actually receive something from the CHIPS act. So far they haven't gotten a dime. CHIPS money has overall distributed barely any of the funds.
- mrweasel 2y agoThat's a good point, there's also Trump coming in and potential tariffs. The path set by Pat Gelsinger may no longer be the most profitable, in the short term. Why invest and restructure if you expect the incoming government to cut your competitors off and allow you to cruise along for another four years?
- _huayra_ 2y agoHighly recommend the latest Oxide and Friends podcast where they discuss a lot of this and related stuff: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242
- WOnderFullGOnzo 2y ago[dead]
- ksec 2y agoWe have a whole article on Intel's Board and not a single word on Andy Bryant? Andy Bryant was large part of the reason Pat Gelsinger left Intel in the first place. He has been the Chairman of the Board since 2012 and on the board as Vice Chairman for even longer. So yes, all the strategy and direction of Intel's CEO in the past 10 years prior to Pat Gelsinger can be attributed to him. He also handpicked all the Intel CEO since Paul Otellini. Pat was called number of times to be backed as next CEO to save Intel during and after Brian Krzanich 's era. He said "no" every time. Pat agree to be new CEO to replace interim or later official CEO Bob Swan after Andy Bryant's announced his retirement in early 2020. Handing it over to his friend Omar Ishrak. The share-holding part was the reason why Intel cant cut off its dividends the first thing Pat came back. They only wanted Intel to keep handing out those dividends. And ultimately it was the Shareholders or Wall Street, handing out Board Membership to their circles until it is run to the ground.
- brookst 2y agoWell said. Everyone kept acting like Intel “should be” an innovator but was somehow failing, when the shareholders were running it as a cash cow all along. Rightly or wrongly, they decided a long time ago that it would be more lucrative for Intel to be in decline, and that became self-fulfilling.
- glial 2y agoThis is another reason that any federal investment in Intel should have strings attached.
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoI think Intel should just be bypassed entirely. Each node is such a leap in process it requires entirely new fabs. At that point going with the poorly run incumbent is pointless. A few facts about intel. Wages have been stagnant there for over 20years now. Just recently they had wage reductions across the company and there’s been layoffs for those 20years of stock declines. Tsmc in Taiwan literally pays double on a ppp basis (it’s not even that far off on a direct dollar to dollar basis). Even china has been poaching from intel. Look up the Chinese government funded Lianqiu Lake R&D Center, they are offering more for talent in raw $ terms in a custom built luxury city. And yes I get that if you were born in the USA you probably want to stay there but there’s no hope of intel poaching international talent anymore. Do you know what the current boards plan is? More layoffs and lower wages. Like how the fuck can they compete without talent which they haven’t had for over 20years now. Everyone there knows it’s a stepping stone job. Do the bare minimum in hire and jump as soon as the next opportunity arises. And the government wants to give funding to this short sighted turd.
- ksynwa 2y ago> The Death of Intel I know they are not doing well number wise but is it correct to claim this? Or it exaggerated? If it is somewhat true, what could Intel ideally do to not die? The article talks about Gelsinger's naivete and provides a quanitity for wafers but I don't know what that means.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoIt probably means the death of a high net income business or a business that leads in its field. They fall sufficiently far back that they can no longer afford to pay the wages and capital expenses necessary to compete.