>they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor.
Big companies rarely innovate without competition around.
Big companies rarely innovate without competition around.
If you're selling a subscription to a best-in-market service, there's not a lot of motive to innovate, agreed. Maybe you'd try a new product or a premium variant, but there's no reason to sink effort into advances that won't let you expand userbase or raise prices.
But for Intel? Before AMD got going, Intel's biggest competition was itself 9/18 months previously. Innovation wasn't just for new devices and new buyers, it was how they sold updated processors for machines that were already Intel Inside. They're not waiting on processors to die, they're actively pushing for them to be replaced for performance reasons.
That might create an incentive to release 'good enough' updates and dole out big improvements gradually, but in practice any of that which happened was already ending. Intel appears to be up against the wall regarding 10nm even with a competitor, and has been attempting major innovations to handle 7nm and below for years. With a revenue stream that relies on annual improvements to their product, they seem to have been learning hard into innovation and struggling, rather than waiting for a competitor.
The common complaint about subscription models is obviously good: if the company folds you have nothing, instead of an unsupported product. But it neglects the other issue, which is that companies intentionally cut off the possibility of "good enough" to guarantee revenue.
I don't think its an accident that products like Microsoft Office went to subscriptions around the time it becomes very hard to imagine a new feature actually worth buying for.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/19/in...
The Computerphile YouTube channel as some interviews with computer scientists that worked at Bell Labs during their heyday. It's incredibly interesting to hear about how they screwed around with early Linotype printers (which $100k+ in the 70s) and did things like reverse-engineer the font formats to create custom chess fonts.
They had direct-dial long-distance by 1951, using relays and tubes.
The transistor started making a difference in telephony with the release of the 1ESS switch in 1965. But transistors were a commodity by then.
As you say, bigger companies have a harder time innovting.
Of course, if you are bigger, the more likely it is that there is no competition at certain times.
If you can survive without investing, a lot of companies choose not to.
Microsoft / IBM and now Intel defintely did.
I think it has more to do with the leadership of the company than the size of the company.
-ss