Political Chips

1) When looking for more profits/revenue at a technology company, they'll often either try to push an R&D "big bet" to market half-baked, in hopes of it pulling in new revenue OR put the screws to product and engineering to churn out some "quick wins" to give them some momentum.

2) When focusing more on engineering, it's often because they're either distracted by other challenges faced by the organization outside of engineering OR they are up against an existential threat that mandates engineering investment and letting them steer the strategy somewhat.

the inner sanctum of very flat Apple was as far from feudalism as could be, for my several years, and it functioned like a very performant ecosystem of engineering. This diametrically contrasts precisely with Amazon engineering, where I saw all the horrors of feudalism and generalized nepotism (racism for example, sexism promoting incapable people to fit quotas, and flagrant corruption). Facebook was somewhere more like Apple but not in its DNA...just in the imitation is flattery sense.

As an accountant, I would quibble with this aspersion and lay the blame with management and other, broader issues.

> It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job elsewhere.

This seems true of many companies. Many of us are just playing musical chairs with our careers and jobs trying to find that job that doesn't suck.

That's stark raving mad. It is for example one of the clearest signs someone is running a Ponzi scheme. Which would seem to transfer over to this not quite as dishonest domain.

Reverence for GE, a company doing technical things that started stack ranking and firing their employees.... Plus eventually got first their fingers and then last time I checked their whole body burned by going into financial businesses, very much not a core competence.

Is that not true?

I personally place more blame on Muilenberg's predecessor, James McNerney, a former Proctor & Gamble, and 3M executive.

James McNerney was a Harvard MBA who spent time at McKinsey before going to the Jack Welch clown show at GE, where he ran the aircraft engine business for a long time. When he lost out to Immelt to be CEO there, he went to 3M for a few years then bounced to Boeing.

Now, Muilenburg has to bear the mistakes he made: pushing an unsafe plane through certification, not listening to the right people, not investigating the Lion Air crash sufficiently, etc. But the evidence I think strongly shows that someone who was not an engineer was making the final decisions on the "bet the company for the next 10 years" choice to go forward with the 737Max rather than a clean-sheet design, back in 2011.

Precisely the issue. It's not "any random business". It's any business with the appropriate properties and connections. If it was truly just random business, perhaps the bail outs would not create such a level of moral hazard. But it's not, and businesses know that.

Intel made a calculated bet, lost, and furthermore made a handful of other bad business decisions. We focus a lot on the latter part when in reality it's unlikely the "business" decisions were the primary reasons for failure... it very well may have been technical problems led by engineers in the first place.

I don't think Intel acted irrationally.

Last, this is the journey of almost all industries. The titans become too complacent, set for disruption by other smaller companies / outsiders. This is just the natural course of business due to inertia. Intel is hardly alone here.

EDIT: All that being said, the right man for the job is in the CEO chair. I personally believe he always should've had the role. We'll see how Gelsinger turns it around. I am optimistic.

Free trade has been the proven way to become rich (and thus powerful).

Sold to Marvell in 2006 right before the iPhone appeared.

Intel then spent billions trying to make x86 commercially viable on mobile.

It seems that Intel had ‘always make x86 / backwards compatible’ as their fixation.

The yields are indeed hard to predict, so if that would have been the only problem, then there would not have been so much reasons to blame the Intel management.

As I have already mentioned, Intel has behaved as if being completely unable of predicting the electrical characteristics of the devices made with their future 10-nm processes.

The first generation of 10-nm products was Cannon Lake, launched in 2018. I have actually bought out of curiosity the Intel NUC with Cannon Lake U, together with an Intel NUC with Coffee Lake U, a 14-nm CPU launched simultaneously with Cannon Lake U.

The 10-nm CPU had pathetic performances in comparison with the 14-nm CPU, i.e. much lower clock frequency at identical power consumption or much higher power consumption at identical performance.

This too low performance should have been determined very early during the design of Cannon Lake and the project should have been canceled even before reaching the tape-out phase.

Even the 2nd variant of the 10-nm process, used for Ice Lake in 2019 was inferior to the by then 5-year old 14-nm process. This should also have been known enough in advance to cancel Ice Lake before tape-out.

Converting any Intel factory to mass production of 10-nm wafers should have never begun before having a working 10-nm process able to make electrically-better transistors than in the old 14-nm process.

Intel has begun the mass-production of chips using the 14-nm process in 2014. By then they must have already started the design of the 10-nm process, but only in 2020 they have succeeded to make better 10-nm transistors than their 14-nm transistors (while still having a lower maximum clock frequency) and only in 2021 they have succeeded to exceed the old transistors in all parameters.

It is impossible to understand why have they wasted huge amounts of money for failed projects like Cannon Lake and Ice Lake and for factories using uncompetitive process variants, instead of concentrating all their resources to their top priority of finding a way to manufacture 10-nm transistors that are better than their existing 14-nm transistors, which is normally a precondition for starting any design process of a CPU using a new process and for building a new factory.

It all looks like if most people working at Intel would not have been aware that they actually do not have any working 10 nm manufacturing process, and they were continuing all their usual activities, like designing CPUs, but with fake transistor models, or building new factories, while there was some gang who knew that the 10-nm process does not exist outside fake presentations, but they hoped that there will be some miracle and the 10-nm process will just work when the time comes to use it.

I’m 100% convinced now that an Intel split into foundry and CPU vendor is inevitable.

It’s a political if not a commercial necessity if Intel is to provide a viable alternative to TSMC.

My wife is fundamentally a socialist (we are in Canada so it's not a misunderstood bad scary word :-). But she is also a home depot manager, where she is the voice of capitalist market forces. What she wishes the system should be, and the system she is daily a part of, are frequently at odds.

I personally find extremes of any given philosophy to be impractical and untenable. I respect more people who, like it appears yourself, say "this is my general leaning,and these are my pragmatical exceptions".

No bombs will fall anywhere near TSMC's facilities. No tanks will go anywhere near their employee parking lots. Life will go on just like before. For a few years, at least.

It'll be just like Hong Kong. No bloodshed there either.