Intel doesn't know how to be a foundry, Tim Cook reportedly said in 2011

(2011). And Cook was right. I worked at Intel for a few years during that decade and the foundry efforts were just not set up for success; in my area, they hired a bunch of new people, put up a firewall between us internal folks and the foundry folks, then without any guidance turned them loose. I was not even allowed to talk to them to troubleshoot equipment issues. They also got all of the equipment that we’d rejected for various reasons like poor process control, so they were newbies with worse equipment trying to start up a new group without help beyond what vendors would provide (for $$$)

I have no insight into the customer facing side

This situation has been and maybe always will be common. Those who view themselves as integrated manufacturers of *products* often cannot equally package, deliver, and sell their component *services*. No matter how good those services are at delivering the end product—and sometimes they are completely world-class or genuinely unique—they're almost always highly designed, refined, and evolved over years to map to the specific end products and their one business. They are NOT designed, refined, or evolved to be reusable, retargetable capabilities for all interested parties.

By any rights, the major systems manufacturers of the 2000s—Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems—should have had an enormous leg up in becoming the planetary scale, "red shift" cloud computing providers of today. Let's kick major operating environment vendors of that era in for good measure—Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware. Maybe even Oracle and SAP. They had the technical capabilities, the economies of scale, the vendor ecosystems, the customer relationships, the financial might. "Permission to win." Yet, only a few have made it. Microsoft has made the transition with Azure, but it's been a long hard pull. Maybe a few participation trophies for IBM and Oracle. But as a group, where are they, cloud-wise? Not too impressive that AWS and Google and others that had no classic "required assets" or "permission to win" have wiped them off the playing field or kicked them deep into the "others" bin.

You can call that classic innovator's dilemma, and there's a lot to that. It's insanely, unfathomably hard to disrupt your own current successful business for new delivery models and aspirations. But there's something else as well: services and products are different beasts. They take different mindsets, expectations, business models, and metrics. All the best to Intel in becoming that new thing, a service provider. But it not just a side gig or slight extension. It's a radically different thing, and it's no wonder the highly successful product Intel of 2011 wasn't also a good service provider.

>TSMC founder says Tim Cook told him in 2011 that Intel did not know how to be a foundry

That is the Original Title. It could be edited as "Tim Cook told TSMC in 2011 that Intel did not know how to be a foundry" - That would still have been accurate with the date on.

Now the title has been editorialised, and meant or imply something else. Like most of the comments are already suggesting.

If you haven’t listened to it already, Acquired remastered their TSMC episode. You can find that here https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/tsmc-remastered

If you are interested in getting more context on TSMC, this is a great place to start.

Less of a technical reason than the fact that TSMC was willing to go farther in accommodating Apple's demand (which is right). Also, this is Morris Chang relaying, so not totally unbiased.

   The implication was that Intel lacked the customer-centric mindset required for a foundry business. Unlike TSMC, which tailors its process technologies to meet customer needs, Intel was used to designing and producing its own chips and struggled to adapt to servicing external clients. By contrast, Apple valued TSMC's ability to listen and respond to specific demands, something Intel historically did not do.

Well, he's not wrong

Subdivisions that only work for one customer grow around all their idiosyncrasies and it's hard to adapt later

Actually putting the design work into something you can work with is hard work

In 2011. Seems like that should be in the title.

> "When the customer asks a lot of things, we have learned to respond to every request," Chang said. "Some of them were crazy, some of them were irrational, [but] we respond to each request courteously. […] Intel has never done that, I knew a lot of customers of Intel's here in Taiwan and all [of them] wished that there were another supplier."

Companies just don't get it, that customer service is almost always the most important aspect of the company. The customer will put up with a lot of bullshit if communication is rock solid.

Handing off your customer service to agents that don't have reading comprehension, who don't have any authority, or who are completely non-understanding is going to hurt business.

And I'm not talking about customer service that can write flully emails thanking and apologizing and butt kissing, I'm talking about good customer service is when the agent understands the request, takes it seriously, runs it up the flag pole if needed, and can act on it.

This is back in 2011, when Intel was first flirting with the Foundry business, and has little bearing to their efforts today. That first effort mostly died. The goal wasn't to become a major player like Samsung/TSMC, but to ensure factories don't sit idle (i.e. just fill in the gaps with small customers). Intel products would get priority.

The current vision is very different: It's to somewhat separate the fabs and Intel's products, and the end goal is that Intel Products will just be another Foundry customer.

Whether they can achieve this is another story.

So, Intel's fault was being focused on selling you the whole widget and telling you what you wanted, instead of something that met your needs. Just like Apple, IMO - the whole "product vision" thing is great when it's about figuring out how to sell a good smartphone and terrible when it's selling iPads with desktop chips in them that can't do any useful professional work outside of drawing.

Given what we know about Apple and Cook, this seems like at least a modestly foolish story for Chang to have told.

Apple’s senior leadership has always for better or worse had long memories and held even longer grudges. And they don’t like partners to speak for them, or create the impression—even if accurate—that Apple has a dependency on a single supplier.

Just think where Intel would be today if they had truly leaned in and made the necessary changes to supply the iPhone chips.

And just a note, Intel is losing money and still as of the third quarter of last year paying a dividend while complaining about cash flow

Particularly relevant with the 100% tariffs that Trump is going to try to ram through:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ta...

Sure they do. They just don't have any capacity for producing the chip density that Apple demands. It's like showing up to a motorcycle factory and complaining that they don't know how to manufacture cars.

If America wanted EULV fabrication, it had to be organized and funded by the state. American fabs already made their business decision.