Absolutely not. I just cannot wrap my head around the fact that no one among Intel management had the guts to stand up against the company being actively destroyed/mismanaged for so long. Intel perfectly knew about Zen/Ryzen. Intel knew about TSMC/Samsung 7nm nodes. They still kept dragging their 14nm node when it was obvious they didn't even had the capacity to mass-produce many-cores CPUs not to mention that 14nm doesn't quite work for such a scenario 'cause you end up with CPUs which have an insane TDP.
1. Most of the decent people in Intel left for other jobs, that is to Google, Tesla, Apple etc.
2. It wasn't destroyed or mismanaged, you are viewing the situation with the present times. At that time they had no competition. Sales were increasing, they were making YoY increase in Revenue and Profits, breaking records after records. Everything is Great!
3. Intel didn't knew about Zen or Ryzen. Or they did but they didn't care. Intel's bread and butter, that is the Laptop CPU and Datacenter business even as of today is still perfectly fine. ( For now )
4. The only way to tell a perfect lie is to actually lie to yourself and you somehow believe in the lie. Which is 10nm is going to come. And everything will be fine.
5. Who cares if 14nm is dragged along for another generation if you had no competition.
6. Intel's 10nm is roughly TSMC 7nm with slightly better density, but not as good TSMC 7nm+ ( EUV ). Which is to say even TSMC 7nm roadmap were right at the time Intel would still have the lead if they had ship it in 2018.
7. The Capacity problem is still the biggest mystery to me. I still don't believe in Ian's take about Hyper Scale Server Customers taking more orders.
Basically, Intel got to be where it is at today mostly because of Andy Grove. Only Paranoid Survive mentality. And you can tell from the post they aren't really paranoid at all. The only one who is paranoid was Andy Grove disciple Pat Gelsinger. And he was driven out of Intel by the current Chairman Andy Bryant. Andy is a finance guy, he only looks at sales data, profits and revenue.
It is actually very common for big companies in monopoly or their own bubble to have little to no productivity. And sit there doing nothing. So I don't see how this so hard to believe. If anyone who has been in working for over 10 years and worked in several Fortune 500 companies will realise you most company are very much like this. Lots of Discussions and little action.
And one reason why people go to Startup.