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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: more Intel bad news
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2025 01:33:00 +1000
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On 29/06/2025 1:01 am, john larkin wrote:
> On 28 Jun 2025 10:09:44 +0100 (BST), Theo
> <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
>>> On 28/06/2025 1:04 am, john larkin wrote:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.theverge.com/news/693528/intel-automotive-business-shutdown-layoffs
>>>>
>>>> Is Intel the next DEC?
>>>
>>> Seems unlikely. DEC essentially ignored personal computers. Intel isn't
>>> making that kind of mistake - it's a big player in a complicated market,
>>> and while it clearly didn't make the right choices in the automotive
>>> business market, there are lots of other markets where it still seems to
>>> be doing well.
>>
>> They're outsourcing marketing to Accenture.  Surely marketing should be a
>> core competency for any substantial company?  You need to understand the
>> product and the customers, and I can't see how a third party agency is going
>> to do that better than the company itself?
>>
>> Ah, Accenture has an AI.  That makes it alright then.  All fine, most fine,
>> nothing to see here.
>> https://www.techradar.com/pro/intel-set-to-transfer-marketing-jobs-to-ai-that-could-ironically-be-running-on-intel-processors
>>
>> Theo
> 
> Intel doesn't need PR or marketing; they need good semiconductors.

Build a better mouse-trap and the world will beat a path to your door.

This rather ignores the difficulty of working out what a "better 
mousetrap" would look like to your potential customers, and how you 
would draw it to the attention of the potential customers who might want 
to buy it if they could be made aware of what it might do for them.

> Intel spent $110 billion on stock buybacks that they should have spent
> on technology.

In your ever-so-expert opinion.

> They messed up phones, DRAM, flash, CISC, RISC, ARM, EUV, FPGAs, and a
> bunch of other stuff. They are run by rich moron bean counters now.

Bean-counting mostly works - more often in a relatively mature 
technology. Your list of things that they "messed up" is a bit strange - 
I was in England when "ARM" was being invented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

Intel never had a chance to mess it up.

Intel was always a customer for EUV lithography, and quite how Philips 
ended up doing so well with it (ASML is a Philips spin-off) is a bit of 
a mystery. Philips had an electron-beam microfabricator business, and 
messed it up badly enough that they sold it off to Cambridge 
Instruments. The machine was fine, but the customer service wasn't good 
enough.

> When your compensation is mostly the value of your stock options,
> complicated things like transistors are an annoyance.

Not when they are your entire business.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney