[streblo]

Intel missed GPUs, missed ARM, missed ASICs, missed everything right under their nose for the last 15 years. This from Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" company, a company that in it's own past pivoted from commoditized RAM production to become the one that won the CPU race, a company perfectly positioned to win the next big cycle as the dominant leader in the industry.

This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.

[ethbr1]

> They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.

The issues with MBAs and bean counters are that they rarely have intuition about which is which, and only investing in areas a company is already successful in is rarely a winning long term strategy.

[wpm]

It was put best by Steve Jobs:

“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.”

I’m watching this happen at my current company. It’s tragic, and so obvious.

[xadhominemx]

The issue with Intel is certainly not the MBAs, although they are numerous.

The issue is that engineering leadership failed to execute on the process technology roadmap.

[dreamcompiler]

But it won't cost you your job. Investing in a new strategy that fails might do so.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.

Agree with the first sentence, strongly disagree with the second.

Intel's problems over the past 15 or so years certainly wasn't that they had cut away all the "fat" and then into the "muscle and bone". It was they had gotten too fat and directionless. Indeed, one of the quotes from the letter regarding their foundry business is that they invested in the wrong things: "Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand. In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized. We must correct our course." If they had ruthlessly prioritized before (which may have included getting rid of ill-fated initiatives earlier) they would most likely be in a better position today.

[mentos]

Heavily paraphrasing but I believe I remember Ed Catmul saying in his Pixar book having slogans like this are dangerous because you just say the thing and don’t actually do it.

[BeetleB]

> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over.

This is a very tiring narrative. People keep complaining about Paul Ottelini missing the iPhone, but his performance at Intel was better than the next 3 CEOs, 2 of which were engineers with roots at Intel.

[terminalbraid]

It is tiring. It is also the correct description of reality and horrifically pervasive, which is why it is tiring.

[alecco]

> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over.

Google CEO is a McKinsey guy.