Isn't this just a culmination of nearly a decade of unforced errors and mismanaged strategy? I'm a complete outsider but I see a couple of fundamental huge misses by Intel over the past 10 or so years:
1) Completely missed the boat on mobile. Their ARM-competitive chips (Atom, etc.)... weren't. Missed on every measure from power to performance. Let Qualcomm and Samsung eat their lunch.
2) Missed too many ticks and replaced them with tocks. Fell far behind because of ridiculous tilt-at-windmill folly around Itanium and other architectural decisions that absolutely didn't pay off. Ended up taking way too long to get further down on process size.
3) Lost their competitive edge so much that Apple finally realized they can do it better and suffer the transitional costs of building a middleware layer to translate off of x86. Apple's fully committed to that, so Intel doesn't just lose the "no one is using a PC anymore" market, they're also losing the "those people who DO use home computers which happen to be Apples" market.
It's absolutely incredible to watch these formerly phenomenally innovative companies falter at that very core competency of staying cutting edge but we see it happen over and over again.
1) Completely missed the boat on mobile. Their ARM-competitive chips (Atom, etc.)... weren't. Missed on every measure from power to performance. Let Qualcomm and Samsung eat their lunch.
2) Missed too many ticks and replaced them with tocks. Fell far behind because of ridiculous tilt-at-windmill folly around Itanium and other architectural decisions that absolutely didn't pay off. Ended up taking way too long to get further down on process size.
3) Lost their competitive edge so much that Apple finally realized they can do it better and suffer the transitional costs of building a middleware layer to translate off of x86. Apple's fully committed to that, so Intel doesn't just lose the "no one is using a PC anymore" market, they're also losing the "those people who DO use home computers which happen to be Apples" market.
It's absolutely incredible to watch these formerly phenomenally innovative companies falter at that very core competency of staying cutting edge but we see it happen over and over again.