They completely missed the boat on mobile and AMD has leapfrogged them very recently on desktop. On top of that there were the Spectre vulnerabilities which shook confidence even further. This announcement is another huge blow given the extent to which the entire consumer electronics industry tends to follow Apple. I would be interested to hear an insider's perspective on such a rapid decline.
You can have the best architecture in the world (no idea if they have) and the best engineers, it's hard to compete when you're so far behind in transistor size.
Instead of putting them way ahead it cost them years of recovery and let AMD sneak up from behind.
That had to be a heavy blow because the politics in this company are ugly.
I feel like sometimes people look past the most obvious signs of why a company is struggling.
For example, Apple’s move to the mothership had a major impact on the company. It was one of the company’s biggest “product” releases. No one mentions this as a reason for anything.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-ceo-idUSKBN1JH1VW
The problem (in my non-insider view) is that Intel's 10nm just hasn't delivered. It was delayed substantially, and faced several problems even after rollout.