These companies didn’t fail because of myopic financial engineers. The ones focused on quarter to quarter tend to bomb the company relatively quickly and do get flushed out.
These companies failed because of long term financial visionaries. These are the worst because they are thinking about how the company can capture markets at all costs, diversify into all adjacent markets, etc. They are a hard cancer to purge because on the surface they don’t sacrifice stuff for the current quarter. They sacrifice laser focus for broad but shallow approaches to all kinds of things.
“Sure, we’ll build a fab here. And we’ll also do enterprise NICs… And also storage… and also virtualization… and also AI… and also acquire some startups in these fields that might have something interesting…”
The company becomes big listless monster coasting on way too many bets spread out all over the place. There is no core engineering mission or clear boundary between what is the business and what isn’t.
Intel is far from “myopic”. If it was something as obvious as a next quarter driven CEO, the board would have made a change immediately.
Long term financial visionaries? No they’re simply plundering the business to reward shareholders and executives through buybacks and dividends. They rationalize this as “maximizing shareholder value” but it is destroying long term value, growth and innovation.
CEOs not focused on product vision who focus on “company growth” as a vague vision are what lead to Intel, GE, etc. There is no greedy raiding of the coffers like your caricature implies in this scenarios.
Here’s an article unpacking the financialization at Intel. The good stuff is about halfway down.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi...
My point is that visionaries can drive everything into the ground and people like you will ride the ship down with support not realizing the negligence at play.
I’m here saying, “fires are not the only thing that destroy homes, floods wreck way more” and you’re digging in with evidence of fires.
That article is looking at things focused on financials, but intel did not fuck up on underinvestment. They invested in cutting edge stuff like uv lithography that now others are reaping the benefits on.
They jump onto the latest trend, e.g. ESG to get in good with the banks and funds without thinking about what long term damage it is doing to their brands and products.
> ESG investment funds in the United States saw capital inflows of $3.1 billion in 2022 while non-ESG investment funds saw capital outflows of $370 billion during the stock market decline that year
The amount of funds with an environmental or social mandate is trivial; and nearly all of those mandates require essentially nothing.
It is sad how easy it is to dupe mediocre men into believing thinking they are victims, when in fact they are simply whiny little snowflake losers.