> Looking at the technical quality of their non-x86 products, most of it was not great, so it is not surprising to see the rot spread.

What's a damn shame is Intel's StrongARM / XScale division in the early-to-mid-2000s. Methinks the world would be very different today if they continued investment in that sector - and we'd have more than just Qualcomm and Apple to contend with.

Yes that was spectacularly dumb, considering how Intel grew big themselves: out-competing the high-end, big-bucks server and workstation vendors with low-end, mass-market CPUs that eventually, through economies of scale, made them obsolete. Yet Intel thought "eh this cheap, mass-market CPU that every household has dozens of will lead nowhere, lets sell it lol". they probably deluded themselves that they could do it in x86.

That decision was made by the CEO.

An interesting case of alternative history would be:

What if Jobs asked the CEO to make the processors, and the CEO went to the employees to get feedback on the idea. My guess is that the engineers would be like ‘yeah let’s do this, we will learn so much!’ and the marketing/business folk would be like ‘is this a $100M opportunity? nope, don’t engage’

Imagine if questions like these were brought to the whole worker base? There is so much knowledge and intelligence at the leaves of the organization that doesn't make it up the chain.

The amount of fiddling and coddling that is done to "protect" the director and GM level folks is incredible. With each level respinning the facts to match a pre-approved mileiu.

> The amount of fiddling and coddling that is done to "protect" the director and GM level folks is incredible. With each level respinning the facts to match a pre-approved mileiu.

Given that the practical survival of technology megacorps depends heavily on internal competition and making unpopular internal moves, I'm surprised that megacorps today still don't foster internal competition and encouraging the propagation of negative opinions as much as they should.

As an example of an org that does it _right_ (even if I have absolutely no idea _how_ they do it), look at Apple: when the iPhone was ready for release they made the gut-wrenching decision to axe the superbly profitable and hugely popular iPod product line. It's hard to imagine another company doing something as drastic at that, especially when the bright future of the iPhone wasn't really established until after the defeat of Blackberry and Windows Phone by 2013.

I remember the inherited DEC team split, causing the Intel development to stall.

This was amid the height of the RISC - CISC drama and hardly noticed at the time.

> Intel may be slowly dying, but this is fine and eventually happens to all ageing corporations.

The sad bit is, it will lead to consolidation at the hand of few players which would be worse for customers. Intel used to have good products in flash space.

I think eventually China will catch up and give 'em hell. They have to have a national processor that is competitive with the west out of strategic considerations. After what happened to Huawei they will double their effort.