I'm an old fa-t, and I have seen how this has progressed at many other companies - Intel's days are numbered.
When you hear "Focus on core products" it is time to go. Intel will continue shutting down and selling off businesses so they can focus their resources on "core products". It is the working folk that take the initial hits, the VPs and senior staff end up leaving after the working folks have been decimated.
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Intel's culture has always been to promote people who can take other people's credit, people who can leverage, influence, coordinate, without doing anything substantial. All technical work were pushed down to the newest young hire, to the suppliers, even to summer students. The quality of work is poor. As soon as the PC luck runs out, it collapses.
Grove is long gone. Once the founders move out of a company the accountants, suits and MBAs move in and play their own politics and the 1% of talent generating 99% of the value get fed up and leave. AMD surpassed with their uarch and chiplets and TSMC with their foundry. It's not that they are as good, they just weren't horrifically bad like Intel.
'What happened to this company and when?'
Many prior threads on this. Here is the cliff notes version:
- Intel got bloated and lazy focusing on core business.
- Core business was undermined from below by better ARM solutions
- Core business demands slows
- Intel failed in wave after wave of acquisitions and new businesses starting in late 90s.
- Intel internal culture has too much intellectual gyrating with no real output, redundancies, excess process, excess levels of management
- DEI policies have created internal tribalism, shunned meritocracy and have contributed to all of the above problems.
- Intel CEOs have gone from internal focus (ASG) to external bloviating and demeaning rivals (like saying it wouldn't be smart for companies to rely on TSMC fab in Taiwan) or belittling potential customers (like saying Apple is 'a lifestyle company' and did 'o.k.' on their own processor designs.
- I
Q as interested outsider: When I was a CS student in the early 1990s and took a microarch course Intel was touted as one of the freshest (we studied the Itanium processors) and most profitable companies (I remember my prof saying with awe: Profit margins of 27% - only lipstick (10,000% markup) was higher). Grove was also touted as a management genius (eg early on recommended strategies to fight Goodhart's Law. Grove wrote in "High Output Management" mgmt needs two opposing metrics to avoid gaming KPI metrics (eg measure productivity and number of defects, and score on combo results)
What happened to this company and when?