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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

The more I have seen of big tech companies, the more I think they need to split up from time to time. Complacency and ossification emerge as a product of scale. If you want to avoid them, reduce your scale. If your manufacturing engineers (really, the managers) need to be at the cutting edge of manufacturing or be out of a job, they will figure out how to get there.

Intel has had a number of embarrassing technology misses that have put them behind: the first I remember was through-silicon vias for 3D stacking and it was only a matter of time before they missed something necessary for an advanced fab, and they missed on EUV.

Their foundry engineers at the same time were recruiting more engineers out of school on the basis that they were the "best in the world." They thought their position was unassailable because they had high yield at 22 nm, so they rested on their laurels and missed technology after technology before it bit them.

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There is little information available on what was actually going on inside Intel. All big companies have big problems and each single division or working group is not indicative of the company as a whole. You can find several people with good and bad experience painting all kinds of pictures. A single voice won't tell you the whole picture. Probable even the leaders of Intel don't really know exactly where they are standing.

Of course all companies go through cycles of explosive growth, ossification and renewal. Small companies often die because too much of the company goes sour at the same time. In big companies this can be more spread out over time and space and there's always enough left to rebuild the leadership from the inside and push out new profitable products in time.

That being said I don't have any indication that Intel right now is in a particularly good position. Nobody in the engineering area seems to feel too honored for having worked at Intel. Yet, they got 10nm finally working and continue to rake in money. Of great concern to me is that much of that money is paid out to investors instead of reinvesting it into the company. There doesn't seem to be a convincing plan of growing the business in the future. Also they did not admit that they have a serious problem at their hands for a long time. You just can't trust anything that Intel releases; it's just a rosy projection of the future when everything goes as planned.

Unless a group of senior Ex-Intel get together and tell their war-stories we won't know what actually was going on inside.

> The more I have seen of big tech companies, the more I think they need to split up from time to time. Complacency and ossification emerge as a product of scale.

This is highly anecdotal. Apple got to where they are with M1 by vertically interesting which wouldn't be possible if they broke up like you said.

Rather, in a pipeline the bottleneck determines throughout - Intel's bottleneck is manufacturing and that's what they need to fix or cut out. We have no reason to believe their design with TSMC chips won't best AMD it even apple.

> The more I have seen of big tech companies, the more I think they need to split up from time to time.

This is somewhat true of every industry. Industrial companies in particular are always playing the game of conglomerization vs. specialization. But I agree it will definitely be interesting to see this play out in Tech in the near future

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