ELT has long understood the need to reduce the complexity of the company, but no one was volunteering to get their group or projects reduced. Enter a CEO with a VC background, picked by a Board which is full of Finance types.
Board and ELT indecision has been strangling the company for at least the past 15 years, with the resulting bloat causing many projects to be prematurely cancelled due to lack of funding or a roadmap which could not provide an instant hit.
Kind of like a morbidly obese fab worker having a snickers bar to get through their next period of time in the fab. It doesn't end well.
Bob wanted to slash the organization and shed IDM, but was prevented from doing so by the Board and ELT. It appears that the Board has finally come to the realization that Intel as a large conglomerate is destined to fail if nothing is done, and soon.
The market sees this and that is why the stock keeps trolling along in the low $20s to upper teens, and the Board sees that perfectly well.
When the Sales GM said they were having 'fun' in planning the future, I think he was referring to what is coming. Pat was still trying to hold IDM together, and prevented larger headcount action in this last round of 'fun', and now we all see what it means to remove the forces holding back what everyone knows has to be done.
Finance and various consultants were telling ELT what needed to be done in order to compete with TSMC, and to stop making such poor strategic decisions, and they were largely ignored by those still stuck on IDM.
IFS can't be spun off till it is cost efficient, but at the same time there are many smaller datacenter related product groups who no longer make a lot of sense now that Intel is no longer dominant in datacenter (no need to keep trying to provide an end-to-end solution).
And of course the organization gets flatter, and any executives who still try to hold back progress are pushed out. Complexity is reduced by making the organization smaller and more focused on the core businesses, and that enables the org to get flatter, because there is less need to manage the complexity.