Otellini started the trend of not properly reinvesting money in the company, in particular near the end of his tenure. He could be blamed for not getting into smartphones/tablets, but it's difficult to say even with hindsight whether that would have worked well or not. I think the only 'smart' move in that respect would have been to shift toward a foundry model to service that market.
Missing Smartphones/Tablets is just a smaller picture.
The "spirit" of Moore's Law leads not only to faster computers, but primarily cheaper, smaller, and lower powered computers, which Intel has been resistant to transition to every single time.
-Value market? Didn't have one until Cyrix forced them
-Pentium M? Transmeta threat
-Core 2? AMD threat
-Atom? Mobile threat
Intel should have had cheaper chips out, they should have had smaller chips, and they should have had lower power chips, without the competition forcing them. Every engineer wants to do better than what they have done before. So why is an engineering based company not doing that?
Moore's Law FAVORS lower power too. You hear it every time, "20% better performance or 40% lower power".
BK is at fault for Intel's current state. He sold the board on a promise of capturing tablets and smartphones and basically gave away the chips for free to try and make it happen. It might have happened if they were willing to continue for long enough, but instead it was abandoned too soon to see any return on the investment. At that point he had no idea what else to do and hence started pumping the stock with buybacks. Couple that with his background in manufacturing management leading him to believe that he knew better than the engineers and you had the recipe for 10nm and beyond. He also setup Sapphire Rapids for failure with the decision to skimp on proper pre-silicon validation.
BK seemed to have done more than just pitch a failed strategy. From what they were talking about, he was pretty much sabotaging the company. He was in the news recently for having super low ratings from employees in the company he's at now.
Bob Swan was fine with letting BK's mismanagement continue to strangle Intel to death. After all, times were good and profits could be used to pump the stock price via buybacks. On the order of $13B a year of stock buybacks. Just think if even half that money had been reinvested in, ya know, manufacturing and R&D.
He didn't make it worse though. Many said Swan was brought into stabilize before Gelsinger could make it better. Swan is just a manager, continue to do what he was given.
Only problem being that he was spending on the fab side at a rate to make up for over a decade of neglect and the current financials couldn't support that. And again, he wasn't as aggressive at clearing out the middle management as he should have been... which was a problem because the culture of said middle management had become one of overpromise and underdeliver.
The reason that I can't get with him is I bet he based his strategies on the Covid lockdowns continuing. That's where all the increasing PC market projections relied on too. That's why he was so aggressive in spending. Because he likely believed it would continue. There's something that didn't materialize as he expected.
LBT is currently in the process of destroying what remains of Intel. His initial claims were right on, giving cause for optimism. But unfortunately his actions don't match up.
Yup.
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