Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

Intel is a failed monopolist, unlike Apple! So is IBM with MCA, micro-channel-architecture

yes, they tried with the 'Compute Continuum' .. but this never panned out. They spent loads of bandwidth and money trying to bring this reality into being, but it failed miserably. They assumed every user would have a smart-TV, smart-phone, tablet, and desktop .. all running their hardware/software. Turns out, no - they won't. They didn't "see" that the phone would dominate the non-business segment as it has.

I think a key reason they missed mobile is that it was during Intel's peak dominance and growth. Mobile was smaller, less powerful chips at lower prices and lower margins than Intel's flagship CPUs in that era. The founders who built the company were gone and Intel was a conglomerate run by people hired/promoted for managing existing product/category growth not discovering and homesteading new categories. They managed the conglomerate with a portfolio approach of assessing new opportunities on things Wall Street analysts focus on: margins, total revenue, projected market size and meta-metrics like 'return on capital'.

It's classic Christiansen "Innovator's Dilemma" disruption. Market leading incumbents run by business managers won't assess emerging unproven new opportunities as being worth serious sustained investment compared to the existing categories they're currently dominating.

They wasted the $$ that could have saved Intel by buying market shares back to the treasury to appease hedge fund managers and accountants to increase the share price/yield - a true 'bonfire of the Vanities', not to mention the 'Shitanium' = born dead all tries at resuscitation failed. That one also almost killed HP - it limps along - a broken thing

managers, yeh, intel luvs managers ;)

Yes, the flowering of Moore's Law - especially with SSD and memory density - that is still unfolding to the point that an iPhone/android has power of a high end work station from the year ~~2000, same with CMOS optical sensor density and patterned lenses

i don't think it's just the performance .. it's a form-factor paradigm shift in the consumer end. the younger generations just don't care about screen real estate as much as genX and early Millenials did. the devices became (surprisingly) much more addictive than what ppl expected and consequently, the devices went into pockets, into bed with them .. etc, sad really.

Well not quite... Apple/next spent plenty of years not making money ... their major markets where students and graphics design which don't spent huge. Microsoft world was making piles of $ selling business apps.

Yes, they eventually got it right post-Newton after spending a lot of time on the outside of the sp500.

Yes, Blackberry was run by dinosaurs - they had a chance and wasted it = Apple ecosystem absorbed all, save for google/Android who stayed free

I would argue that IBM failed with the BIOS, since they assumed nobody could make a compatible machine without their authorization since they controlled the BIOS and the idea of a clean room reimplementation never dawned on them. It did dawn on Compaq. MCA came afterward.

> they assumed nobody could make a compatible machine without their authorization since they controlled the BIOS and the idea of a clean room reimplementation never dawned on them

So you're saying that they were somehow unaware of how new BIOS implementations were used in CP/M to port it to new systems?

And that they distributed the BIOS source code with every IBM PC... to make it harder for competitors to build compatible machines due to copyright claims?

And that they were somehow unaware DOS had largely reimplemented the CP/M design and API? (Though DOS's FAT filesystem was a successor to FAT8 from Microsoft's Disk BASIC rather than CP/M's filesystem.)

Your use of straw man arguments in response to a straightforward historical description is both inappropriate and condescending. You may think IBM’s executives were naïve, but that does not change the actual history of the IBM PC. IBM prioritized time-to-market by using off-the-shelf components and assumed their control of the BIOS would prevent compatible clones. That assumption was proven wrong when Compaq successfully did a clean-room implementation of the PC BIOS, without violating IBM’s IP. This is a well-documented part of computing history.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com