VLSI manufacturing makes chips, made of transistors. It does not sell end products. The end products are a concept that their clients care about, not them. The same way a tree farmer does not spend his days thinking about toilet paper, even though that's what he is actually helping create. Instead, he thinks about trees, and how to best grow them.

Make no mistake, he knew he worked on the production of CPUs and memories, it was just not his focus. Also, he certainly cared about switching time, but his observation was about transistor count, not switching time.

Why did their clients care about transistor count?