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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

> But this is very intel: get psyched about a technology, dump billions into it for a few years, flake out

Hit the nail on the head! I worked for Intel nearly a decade ago. I was a full time employee for a few years. They saw Android and the Apple app store capturing mobile users and decided to dump $$$ into an app store for the PC (Intel AppUp). The effort lasted a few years before it crashed and burned HARD. During this time they also tried to spin up Meego/Moblin for mobile and tablet, then a partnership with Samsung to work on Tizen, and bought up McAffee.

The amount of money Intel flushes down the toilet with fruitless endeavors is sad, especially considering the number of people that end up jobless (like many of my good friends did) because of it.

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They started an app store? They're in entirely the wrong market position for such an endeavor, they don't own end user relationships or have any software platform to leverage, let alone software expertise. In fact would have likely suffered a strategic tax of wanting to favor their own processors. What a dead on the water idea. Definitely not the first time Intel has forgotten to stay in their lane.

They have huge contracts with all OEMs and make the drives for their chipsets. Planning to add that appstore to it as bloatware and having an installbase in the hundreds of millions quickly wasn't that crazy.

I thought they would succeed-ish enough for me to register as a developer for App-Up. Alas, they didn't.

Developers: easily neglected by hardware manufacturers.

Platform fails without them, though.

Announce a platform, intending for it to fail? Big fish like Intel are masters at this now.

I noticed this recurring theme. Seems like that eventually all companies go down this path at some point if they become mega rich. At that point money alone doesn't matter as much as capturing new markets do so lots of money goes down the drain. It's a good thing for the companies that get acquired and get their paycheck.

I see as rich people who buy expensive things and let them rot because they forgot they bought them or so.

Public markets demand growth. So boards demand managers who do Growthy Things. When it doesn't grow, you toss the old managers lots of money for their service, find new managers who promise you new Growthy Things, and repeat.

Sometimes bets like these turn out to be huge wins, like Microsoft going into the gaming platform space with the Xbox or Amazon building out cloud services. The Intel app store idea doesn't seem like such an idea to me, but I can see how the board could have been pushing for "outside the box" big bets.

Probably an intentional attempt to self-disrupt, innovator's dilemma and all.

I'd argue that Microsoft and Amazon's branches were at least tangential to what they were doing in the back-end and that they already have most of the required talents to do it right.

I have no idea how Intel could work their way into running an app store beyond "we have tech and market dudes, good enough right?"

With their new fabric/modular system, the modules are effectively "apps". Though possibly sold by app developers, you could install the Adobe module or the Autodesk module and it would have hardware/ram/storage tuned to those applications. It will start with DL and Graphics accelerators but then morph into application specific.

No no no, sorry but it’s a completely different story. Microsoft is a Software company and with the XBox they sought to expand from their business software market into the entertainment software.

It’s still software and besides the hardware which wasn’t much different from a standardized gaming PC, they worked on building the software platform and developer accessories. Something they happen to be pretty decent at...

My first internship was with Intel in the early 2000's with the group that was designing Intel's Infiniband NICs. Between when I accepted the internship and started they already knew they were going to abandon that product development, and the engineering group was all getting moved to chipset development. I got to catalog discontinued hardware.

I’m wondering, how much of that expertise eventually found its way in consumer stuff like thunderbolt and usbc?

100% agreed. We might have been on the same team. Don't forget Omnipath and Xeon Phi. Prediction: this new discrete graphics card as well.

Omnipath went the way infiniband is going. Ethernet has caught up, and surpassed the speeds, so using proprietary technology with fewer features isn't that attractive anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet is faster than the main memory bandwidth on current generation processors.

But not faster than L3 cache bandwidth. Some cards can DMA to L3 cache. Granted, eventually it's flushed to main RAM, so might not help too much in the end.

Cool. That means it both prevents nethammer and allows the cpu to check a signature/decrypt/type check as value stream over the network.

I sat through a Xeon Phi presentation at university, about how it would revolutionize the university's "supercomputer". I left shortly after; did Phi come to nothing?

It was too difficult to get decent performance from Xeon Phi for general use cases. A few apps could make it work e.g. PGS bought up all the old stock for a big geophysics system.

Oh wow i totally forgot their investment in phones! I had a brief stint writing tech articles and was covering mobile around 2013.

Their App Store wasn’t for phones. It was for PC.

Referring to meego/moblin / tizen which were all mobile

Interestingly Meego was really great to use. Super fluid and simple while not hiding linux too far under the covers. If Intel bought Nokia there could easily be three mobile OS in current use.

Interestingly Windows Mobile was really great to use. Super fluid and simple while integrating well into the Windows ecosystem. If Microsoft bought Nokia there could easily be three mobile OS in current use.

Oh wait.. they did. And there's not.

I used them both and there was no comparison. Being snarky because you think it's clever doesn't change that.

The design of the UI and the design of the apps was like the first time using a brand new system where everything has been thoroughly thought through. It used touch very well to be as basic and straightforward as possible.

I'm not really being snarky - it just seems like it.

Lots of people really thought Windows Mobile was great (including here on HN). Meego was great too.

It doesn't matter.

The point is that it's unclear why Intel (a company that has failed at every consumer focused business they have ever tried) would have done better with Nokia than Microsoft did, given that MS has had considerable success in consumer markets, already had carrier relationships, had developer relationships etc etc).

Anyone would have done better if they were left alone. The point is that they already had great technology. I'm not sure how this isn't sinking in, but you seem desperate to point out that Microsoft tanked Nokia, which is actually already common knowledge.

A little less sarcasm and snark will probably leave room for absorbing what people are saying.

desperate to point out that Microsoft tanked Nokia

What? Not at all!

Nokia was screwed before Microsoft bought them. If they'd shipped Meego on phones two years earlier (start of 2009) they'd have had a chance, maybe.

At the time I thought Microsoft was Nokia's best hope (and Nokia was the best hope for Microsoft's mobile strategy).

I'm pushing back on the idea that Intel would have been some magic lifeline for them.

>MS has had considerable success in consumer markets, already had carrier relationships, had developer relationships etc etc

By consumer market, you mean PC market. They were tiny in mobile market. Its the reason they try to shove Nokia into its platform

Nokia already has they the dev relationship, carrier relationship, retail relationship. They dont need all that from microsoft. The only thing they need is money and strong leadership. Nokia was mismanaged into oblivion.

> It doesn't matter

No, it does matter. They were already one foot in the grave, but jumping ship into windows mobile is just the nail in the coffin.

I often see the same sentiment here re:not just meego but also PalmOS and WP7. But the OS being 'well thought out and cool' simply didn't matter by that point.

Apple had revolutionized the category and was making over 90% of the profits, had all the apps and other ecosystem lock-in, the ipad on top of that, the highest user satisfaction, an avalanche of free publicity, almost all of the consumer mindshare, and a fleet of rapidly expanding and phenomenally popular stores for distribution. A brand new "well thought out os" with no apps simply wasn't going to make any kind of dent in Apple's market share.

Meanwhile the anti-Apple enthusiasts had been coalescing strongly around Android for several years. A bunch of big companies were fighting tooth and nail for the scraps and who won? The guys with the "most well thought out Android skin"? No. It was the guys who were by far the most ruthless and shameless competitors. That's what won between all the android handset makers, that's who won between Android makers and other "well thought out OS's" and imho that's who wins all hypothetical matchups as well if all you're bringing to the table is being cool and well thought out.

Now if Intel wanted to lose $5B a year and buy marketshare then yeah they could have done that but they would have never made back that money.

The N9 was released in 2011, only two years into the modern smartphone era. The hardware and software were fantastic and it got a lot of attention but died due to no other devices following it, not because of a lack of demand.

"Despite a limited release,[5] the N9 received widespread critical acclaim, with some describing it as Nokia's finest device to date. It was praised for both its software and hardware, including the MeeGo operating system, buttonless 'swipe' user interface, and its high-end features"

My sentiment exactly. Nokia was in a perfect position to launch a third mobile OS. even primer than windows mobile. Nokia was still on top eventhough declining. Many Nokia app dev are waiting to jump into the Meego ecosystem if Nokia commited. People are waiting for Nokia next move. Unfortunately, it was not a great move.

At launch, we know that the software are great. Hardware are great. But the management was abyssimal. Alot of internal politics, burning money, and ultimately, Meego was killed before it was borne into the world. The irony is that N9 was still a great revolutionary phone critically acclaimed, despite knowing its gonna be short lived.

I wouldnt have been so bitter about it if N9/Meego was not great.

BTW, the Nokia people who worked on MeeGo and the N9 went to create the Jolla company and continue development as Sailfish OS.

(Typed from a Sailfish OS running Xperia X. :-) )

I do get your point, just a couple of nitpicks.

Actually it was only Nokia Mobile that was bought and after how everything went Nokia Siemens Networks, got enough money to buy Siemens part back, become the current owner of Bell Labs and via the HMD agreement, one of the best Android OEMs.

In what concerns Windows, although it lost on the phones, it is winning on the tablet space via 2-1 hybrid/convertible laptops against Android and ChromeOS tablets.

And most PDA like industrial deployments are still mostly Windows based.

Jobless part suck but I think it's smart of them to try. It's like they're playing the law of large number. Keep on trying until they get a unicorn.

Reminds me of how they dropped the Intel Galileo. Since then, I've never been willing to trust that they'll support their efforts.

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