There was a time, some years ago, when Intel mattered. It doesn’t matter any more at all and it is running out of steam.
Soon, Intel will hold its annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF) – it was a must attend event back in the days when the company had many very talented senior executives. Most of them are goners now. Intel was famous for inventing things and driving the industry by using its considerable clout to create stuff.
Now it creates nothing, nothing at all. Like many a large corporation, including Microsoft and many another corp too, it started behaving like an ingrowing toenail, believing – against all the evidence – that it would hold its mighty market share forever.
We did warn Intel repeatedly it shouldn’t rest on its laurels. When it adopted StrongARM, as a result of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) maneuvers, we advised it that it should drastically change its business model and produce some stunning and cheap devices based on that technology.
But no. Like an ignorant bull, it insisted that the world+dog should have notebooks that cost a small fortune.
The last two years has seen its strategy crumble into dust. No one cares about its roadmaps any more. No one gives a flying fart about its process technology. No one has a clue. It lost some of its most talented individuals – Kicking Pat Gelsinger, Mike Fister full of dollars, Mike Splinter and the rest, and blithely pursued a path which will lead it to Carey Street, if it’s not careful.
As we reported a week or two back, the freshly minted CEO is attempting to introduce a top down page and firing all the spin doctors who, these days, couldn’t spin their way out of a paper bag, nor organise a piss up in a brewery or cheese factory.
Like many an old dinosaur, its tiny brain doesn’t realise that it has been dying from the tail up for several years. It is a shame – we have the utmost respect for any company that has factories – this is no trivial matter. But engineering its way out of this current crisis is, we feel, a fab too far to go.
