Intel's Lidar, face recognition, and tracking cameras will be discontinued

Because it was everything they could have hoped for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Who are they benchmarking against? What are their performance targets?

As a result, you get a team who's only deliverable is "PowerPoints that go up and to the right, compared to last week."

And the project soldiers on, because to can it and admit failure would embarrass someone. If it's the CEO, even worse.

Which is maybe explainable for a brand new technology (say, Palm with handwriting recognition), but less so when there are serious competitors out there with known performance levels.

About a dozen years ago I worked for a company that partnered with Intel on a big project. Ultimately the project failed. The biggest problems I saw were:

1) Too many cooks. Different groups from several locations had their fingers all over it. So there were too many expensive, useless features.

2) Too many engineers making product decisions. Engineers often are interested in neat technical features, not in whether a product should include those features. And often engineers don't really care how much those features cost in terms of design time and effort.

3) No real sense of urgency. Consequently there were other, hungrier, companies that ate Intel's lunch.

None of this was new even then. All of this was understood by (other) Intel people way back in the early 1980s. The problem is just how do you herd cats (or engineers or chip architects)? It's very difficult.

You may need to have a small, focused startup to accomplish something. Then that startup gets acquired by the big behemoth. See e.g. Cisco back about 20 years ago. I imagine the same thing happens now, but I don't follow the industry very closely any more.

Also, Cisco at least acquired somewhat related companies. WTF was Intel doing buying companies like McAfee?

Sometimes the spunky competition can even be internal. Again, going back a ways, Intel USA marketing was pushing the architects and engineers to do the Netburst architecture (clock speed was all-important). Which had a lot of problems. Fortunately Intel had what amounted to a startup in Israel. They came up with the Core architecture that saved Intel's ass.

Intel tries to innovate and diversify but they are strangled by their stagnant workforce and internal politics. Two of their biggest acquisitions, Mobileye and Habana Labs chose to remain independent companies to a large degree under separate branding. They source what’s good for them from the mothership, and other than that maintain autonomy. Intel acquisitions which did not do that, instead fully integrating into Intel, mostly failed.