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0 pointsitsoktocry5y ago0 comments

>A different way to explain it is that most people at the company were too career focused then focused on the actual business.

Every time there are market disruptions people come up with retroactive, "just-so" stories to explain the problems. In Silicon Valley its typically blamed on the MBAs.

The idea that a 50 year old company, a pioneer of the computing industry, with over 100,000 global employees has run into trouble because employees are "too career focused" is such a story. Is there any data that bears this out? How would you measure it? Are the employees at AMD naturally risk takers?

Intel made some missteps in an industry with a long planning lead-time. They may or may not recover. But the reasons are not so simple and concise.

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gwbas1c5y ago

"The Innovator's Dilemma," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma, explains the situation very clearly. It's a pattern that repeats itself over and over. Intel hasn't been able to prepare itself for disruption from ARM. The graphs in the article clearly show how ARM is disrupting x86.

The book that I link to provides many examples, but it focuses on how hard drive companies struggled every time the physical size of the disk shrunk. Even when they knew "it's time to make a smaller disk," they'd do something silly and be non-competative.

In the case of Intel, when I interned in 2002, they knew mobile was coming and tried to set themselves up for it... But the rules of selling chips to phone makers are different than seeking chips for PCs. (Just like what the book explained in its examples.) In Intel's case, the margins were too slim in mobile... Which is a typical symptom of how a company gets disrupted.

> Are the employees at AMD naturally risk takers?

Don't confuse AMD (company) with ARM (architecture). ARM chips power all mobile phones and smart TVs. They're cheaper, and now are going to be better than x86 for PCs. (High performance, low power, low cost.) This is a textbook example of distribution. What you'll see are smart TV and phone manufacturers selling ARM PCs that are cheaper than x86 PCs, but perform better. Don't believe me? Just wait until someone realizes that all they need to do is swap Android TV out for Windows (ARM) in their assembly line for their smaller smart TVs, and throw a keyboard and mouse in the box instead of a remote.

(FWIW: AMD was never a threat to Intel. They couldn't manufacture in big enough volume.)