Honestly the article is bullshit. It's right, but for all the wrong reasons. Intel isn't failing because it failed to buy OpenAI or partner with Apple. Intel is failing because they've made shit design decisions on their chips, sat on their laurels when they were riding high and just raised prices (giving up the engineering lead to AMD and TSMC), and then utterly fumbled the responses to multiple public failures when things started to go down hill.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
184 points (91.4% liked)
Technology
59562 readers
2830 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Half the article is about how it takes 4 bad CEOs to wreck a company and Intel is far down that path.
CEOs have very little to do with the failure or success of most large companies. If they work very hard they can pull a company out of a death spiral, or start it down one, but failure or success takes years if not decades of steady improvement or decline. All the examples of "failures" given in the article are terrible and don't demonstrate at all that those CEOs were bad.
One of the worst problems with businesses in the US currently is this culture of fetishizing CEOs. They're paid far too much for what they actually bring to companies, and people grossly exaggerate how much of an impact CEOs have on companies. If you want proof of his just take a look at literally any company Elon Musk is a CEO of. The fact that none of those companies (particularly Twitter) have filed for bankruptcy yet shows exactly how little a truly terrible CEO actually impacts things.
Not true. All they need to do is bring in "their own" people and put them on a few key positions. These Nepo babies bring with them the wrong culture and manage a company to death.
The best people see these assholes coming a mile away and jump ship. They do not get replaced (cost savings on these expensive people is huge) or get replaced by new management with sub standard hires that meet their "yes man" corporate lingo buzzword bullshit standard.
This causes the next wave of talent to leave, the death spiral is in full swing.
All this can happen in a few months. The effects might take a while to show, but I guarantee, it is hard to recover from.
Yep. All they do is meetings and hand shaking. The real work occurs several steps below them.
They’ve also taken the technology basically as far as it can go.
A sentence made out of fluff. What technology? AMD took x86 and gave it wings, better efficiency, neither is only negligible iterative improvements. Intel failed to use lower nm nodes as a first fail.
The world is moving back to RISC, which is my point.
generative AI, which OpenAI released to the world in 2022
What‽ We've only been dealing with this shit for 2 years‽ Fuck it feels like 5 LMAO
With 30% ownership it could have been at the forefront of generative AI, which OpenAI released to the world in 2022.
Do they think openai invented the concept of generative ai, because that's what their statement implies?
Just like musk built the first Tesla in a cave with some scraps. 🙄
Building an electric motor and powerful battery was the easy bit. To this day, it remains a mystery how he sourced the 10,000 plastic clips that hold a Tesla together.
Even if they do think that Open AI invented generative AI, that sentence makes no sense. GPT-1 was released in 2018.
Pretty sure they were going for when it went viral/mainstream
hopefully the bubble bursts soon enough so we'll never have to learn how does it feel to deal with it for five years.
Put the newest intern in charge for a year. They couldn't do much worse than the last 4 CEOs, and would be much cheaper.
And when the company fails anyway because it's too late to change course, the intern is an easy scapegoat!
And when the company fails anyway because it's too late to change course, the intern is an easy scapegoat!
You sound like management material!
When can you start?!
I already didn't!
The savings are unbelievable!!
By Grabthar's Hammer...
Also no golden parachute to pay out
It's cost-effective!
I already felt this way about intel when they hired fucking Will.I.Am to be spokesperson. He made more money in a month than most of their engineers in a year. That was a decade ago. It's only been downhill since. I hope they go fully bankrupt at this point and someone worthy can take over the patents.
Anyone who buys into Will.I.Am's hype is automatically the wrong person to run anything more than a lemonade stand
If Intel said yes to Apple, it would have just made Apple a failure. They've done a shit job at mobile chips for years, and never would have given Apple the control that has led to Apple being at the forefront of the mobile market. (And don't have the advanced nodes Apple is taking the lions share of either).
Four bad CEOs is like a grade school level of analysis. You can spend half an hour on Wikipedia and come up with like 18 other patterns that connect the companies.
Do you really think Warren Buffett (or any other serious investor or business analyst), is sitting there counting out the number of bad CEOs on their fingers when making an investment decision?
What's happening with all the money Biden has given Intel? That just disappeared?
It had probably been paid to people who deserve it less than me. I never steered Intel in a bad direction after all.
The money was to build fabs, which they are still doing - which is costing them most of their money they struggle to afford because their current chips are awful.
Their fabs may be shit too. Hopefully the new ones are better
I mean how bad can the fabs be - they'll be running ASML EUV machines right?
I'm not sure the tool is the the issue here?
A master carpenter with entry level tools will still do a much better job than a klutz with professional grade tools.
Yes, a pro just needs some sand and a lighter and a needle
They went through a phase where they were getting awful yields. No idea why they had those problems and others didn't.
Part of it was to create new jobs and hire people, meanwhile they - *checks notes* - fired a bunch of people?
I just know I don't like Pat Gelsinger's over confident bragging style, it seems dishonest. His claim of winning back Apple was ridiculous, Intel was so far behind what Apple was doing with the M1 it wasn't even funny. And they are even further behind now, than they were then!
Whether he succeeds remains to be seen, but it's not looking good.
Maybe you're right about Gelsinger. I've seen him spew BS but figured he does it because he has to, that Intel has been fundamentally broken for decades, and that he was as a good a CEO choice as they could have made.
he was as a good a CEO choice as they could have made.
I'm not so sure, with the scandals of crashing Intel CPU's we have now, both their CPU line and their production is getting extremely poor PR.
I suspect Gelsinger pushed unfinished products, because he is desperate for results, and now Intel seems worse off than when he took over reputation wise. Gelsinger is losing both money and PR value on 2 fronts for Intel now.
Intel used to have a pretty stellar reputation for reliability, especially in the server market. It seems to me they have little left to build on now.
Something something history repeats itself as farce or something
For context: Intel was founded by people who thought Fairchild Semiconductors wasn't receiving the necessary funding or respect from the owning company.