I never worked for Intel but they were clients for a number of years and I wrote an in-depth strategic analysis of them at one point.

"Toxic" seems a poor choice of phrase based on everything I've seen. Boring--which is to say very heavily into process in all things--is perhaps apropos.

Their biggest issue was projecting x86 into everything. Either by assuming they had the ability to push ecosystems into existence by dint of being Intel (see WiMax) or by inventing essentially non-reasons why x86 would succeed in areas like mobile (Flash will run better if it's the same architecture as desktop).