What should they do instead right now?
Innovate.
For years and years, Intel's approach has seemed to be just add an extra 100Mhz base clock and call it a new model. You appear to be getting largely the same chip on the same process for more or less the same performance compared to a chip from 18-24 months ago.
Meanwhile AMD and Apple have come along with someone new and essentially are eat intel's lunch.
It's not a monopoly though, as there's also AMD.
Itanium is an interesting historical example. I think Intel learnt the wrong lesson though: ‘cling to x86 at all costs’ when it was really that Itanium was just the wrong product. If they’d pushed a high quality Intel only 64 bit RISC design instead of Itanium at the time they might have succeeded.
Edit: Just to expand on this a bit. At the time of Itanium they had a clear process lead. They could have offered the best server CPUs on an Intel only RISC ISA and invested heavily in helping customers migrate. Arm got customers from aarch32 to aarch64 seamlessly.
Why do you think you have the famous "Intel inside" logo or sound or animation in ads? Because Intel pays you to display that...
Or at least it was not too long ago.
https://www-techspot-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.techspot...
Too bad AMD is competitive right now, maybe they should bribe them after all.
But there are only so much your engineers are allowed to do when competing with the company's current cash cow.
Edit: I felt they'd found one organisational solution to this after the netburst bust, what with their R&D branch in Israel (?) working on an alternative (pentium m and what would become the 'Core' architecture) without too much disturbance and avoiding the pitfalls of working on competing products?