Comment by foobiekr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobiekr | Hacker News Reader

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Strategically, in global terms from a US-centric point of view, it would be very good if Intel could recover, as having the entire world reliant on TSMC would be bad for everyone. Also there really isn't any other org like Intel at the moment in the broader sense in a few ways (mostly advanced research).

That said, Intel really has nothing to fall back on. Internally, it is very much like many of the other big companies - run by executive whim papered over with justifications that are tissue thin. There are a lot of companies like this - Cisco, Intel, whatever the hell is left of IBM, Nokia, Lattice, NetApp, etc. - that will probably die this decade if they fail to reboot their executive and managerial cultures.

I have a lot of friends who have been in the great parts of Intel (the CPU design teams and, believe it or not, fabrication) and the crap parts (everything else, especially networking and storage [what's left of it], except maybe the perenially suffering ICC team). Pat has failed to make things materially better because the system that is the body of Intel is resilient to disruptions of the sort he is trying. A massive replacement and flattening of culture is required there and he has not been able to execute on it.

Turnover is coming for all the companies I list above. If I had to go out on a limb and suggest a longterm survivor from the list above, it might be Lattice. Otherwise everyone listed is driving hard straight to the ground internally, whether the market sees it or not.

IBM has been heading toward the ground for thirty years, and they never seem to hit it. Whatever problems they have, they are both diversified and deeply entrenched in all kinds of government and S&P 500 systems and processes, to the point that their performance barely matters. Intel doesn't have anything like that to paper over their deficiencies.

Plenty of places still running AS/400 on crazy high support contracts, and no plans of moving on.

> crazy high

Not high enough that it can't go higher.

Maybe somebody should make a betting site around when the next order-of-magnitude increase on the rent of AS/400 hardware will come. With 6 months granularity.

IMO, the people without a plan are crazy. But yeah, there's plenty of them.

IBM runs much of US banking and insurance.

Their hardware is actually fairly remarkable. If you have a certain kind of mission, it really makes sense to build a bunker around some mainframes.

Oh Nokia is a good example. It's mainly a network infrastructure company now, similar to Cisco, Juniper and Huawei. It's not on the news like Intel but it's dying a similar death. The stories I hear from friends working there reminds me of Intel culture.

IMHO the best outcome for these companies is to go for spin-offs route. Phillips did that with a lot of business units they had and struggle to run (ASML, NXP, their semiconductor fabs etc) and all these businesses turned out to be successful after 4-5 years of tough times. Freshly spun-off companies sometimes went for selling a while project and its dev team to others, or in some cases these projects became spin-offs on their own right. A lot of dead weight (mid-to-high management layers) got fired in the process. It was the right thing to do. Now Phillips is mainly a medical device company, tiny compared to what it used to be, and it is still struggling.

IBM has successfully pivoted to consulting and software solutions these days. It also did $9B in net profit in 2023, while Cisco did $12B in net profit. I'd say that's still pretty healthy.

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