What’s sort of incredibly about America’s Intel is that they haven’t done any of this shit, clinging to their dead-end chip design long after its expiration date and missing the boom in demand for high end chips entirely.
This is the most baffling thing to me. How could Intel leadership be so incompetent? They had the inside track to hundreds of billions in revenue and just decided to coast.
How could Intel leadership be so incompetent?
For the leadership, it was a cash cow. They got a fat dividend doing very little, even as upstarts blasted past them.
They had the inside track to hundreds of billions in revenue and just decided to coast.
At some point, the effort to get from $10B to $100B isn’t worth the pressure. How many extra yachts do I actually need?
Your points are exactly why it is surprising. Most executives don’t think like me and you. If you give them a million dollars, they say they need 10 million. If you give them a billion dollars, they say they need 10 billion. There is no end to their greed. Look at how Google and Amazon are still trying to strong-arm their industries to get even more billions of dollars. Musk is out there demanding a trillion dollars.
CEOs and execs at large multinational corps like Intel don’t usually coast. They might make strategic blunders, but they usually push to make as much money as they can. If they fail, they fall back on their golden parachutes. If they win, they get shitloads more money.
If you give them a million dollars, they say they need 10 million.
Sure. If you show up with a bag of money, they’re going to tell you they need two bags.
But if you ask them to work twice as hard to get that second bag? Suddenly, you’re asking too much.
CEOs and execs at large multinational corps like Intel don’t usually coast.
They do. They’re just not the companies people get excited about. Tons of US business is conducted by C-levels who are barely more than figureheads, commanding massive salaries to glad hands a few friends in between golf games.
Your points are exactly why it is surprising. Most executives don’t think like me and you. If you give them a million dollars, they say they need 10 million. If you give them a billion dollars, they say they need 10 billion.
I think hidden in there is a misconception about capitalism, that its about competition and being the best. While its a nice myth for grade school civics about why we are capitalist its just not the case. Capitalism is about profit. As long as you have it and its growing you are doing well. Intel did get very complacent, but it was still projected to grow and be profitable.
Well, it’s about maximum profit. So if they could make more, it’s insane that they wouldn’t. But it might be that profit in the short term was higher by not spending as much money on R&D, and if there’s one thing stock markets are great at it’s incentivizing short term profit over long term viability.
If I remember correctly, but it’s been awhile since I read the discussion about Intel so I could be misremembering, the problem with Intel started when the C-Suite stopped being engineers that moved up in the company.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Because modern western business is about cashing out the business to squeeze out a couple extra bucks each quarter. They aren’t interested in making a product, just cutting costs, raising prices, and issuing stock buybacks