I had a business partner who was impressed with Intel in a way that I just couldn't understand. In my own area of software expertise Intel was hiring freshers to make half-baked projects that were even more half baked than my own half baked projects and I could never get him to understand how it was a software person would find it almost impossible to be taken seriously in a company that thinks its main competence is hardware.

(That said, NVIDIA is a bit of a counterexample. As much as people complain about their drivers a lot of the brilliance in their product is in the CUDA compiler. I wound up having to fight with NVIDIA's drivers to make a family of machine language learning products deployable and came to have a lot of appreciation for the release engineering work that goes into their drivers even if, in the end, the drivers seem to be just another way to build a mailing list of people to spamannoy)