Before becoming Intel's CEO Paul Otellini served as executive VP of sales and marketing. This uber-blunder is a great example what happens when you let a "bean-counter" run a tech company.

EDIT: corrected factual error. Paul was never a CFO but much of his career was in sales and marketing. Sales do count as "bean-counters" because their main metric are counting PaL.

Disagree. The Sales leaders are generally also looking for continued growth 3 years out. Sales know there’s sprints but you are also running a marathon where continued growth YoY is expected. They should have seen the smartphone potential and started chipping away to grow their base long term.

Similar to why the best sales leaders only do deals where there’s renewal possibilities in 2-3 years out.

I mean you should probably just own the whole mistake — in no world are bean-counters sales people.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bean-cou...

That's not correct. Otellini did not serve as CFO at any time and did not have a finance background. Please check your facts before making a comment like this.

Edit: I see you've changed your comment without acknowledgment. Still wrong 'sales and marketing' isn't 'bean counting' and Otellini had extensive 'tech' experience.

Thanks for pointing out a factual error. I corrected it and added explicit EDIT paragraph.

Have their been any successful major companies run by former CFOs? My experience here is that it is often a death sentence via a long road or stagnation.

Some of their worst years were under Krzanich, who had an engineering background… I think it is hard to guess who’ll be a good CEO for a tech company. Someone like Lisa Su with a background in engineering but also lots of R&D seems like the best pick. The CEO doesn’t need to do the i-dotting, t-crossing engineering stuff anyway, having a good idea conceptual of what is upcoming and possible is more important.

Seems like what you need is a triumvirate... an idea guy (The Jobs), a tech guy (The Wozniak), and a 3rd person who's main job is to keep the first two from killing each other, and ideally a sense for operations and PR.

Jobs wasn't too bad at tech, he passed Al Alcorn's job interview at Atari after all.

Probably "The Eric Schmidt" would be that third person