They lead the creation of a market but failed to maintain any competitive edge in it. That's a story of initial success that ultimately ran through their fingers, like so many other examples you've presented. Calling this fully "a success" seems very generous.
> If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded.
You could spin the entire unit off so it could compete on it's own terms. There's plenty of success stories to be found this way, and Intel's habit of doing this time after time means that I have very little confidence in any new product they bring to market outside of CPU cores and view them mostly as a consumer electronics company now.
The thing you're missing is that they sell the chips inside the product. I think the idea is that it goes like this:
Intel: Hey everyone, we made this chip we think could be really cool in a new form factor.
OEMs: Uum, I dunno -- if that's such a cool thing, why isn't anyone else making them?
Intel: OK, I'll just make one myself. <makes NUC>
OEMs: Oh hey, people do seem to really like those NUCs. <makes things like a NUC with Intel chips>
Intel: There we go, you get the idea! <stops making NUC>
I don't know this is what happened, but at least it's a plausible definition of "success".
It's a mobile chipset. They're already making those. Other manufacturers also make those. A good hint here is these devices use bog standard 19V laptop power supplies.
The NUC form factor more or less already existed in the fanless industrial mini PC and HTPC markets. Intel just made it a high performance consumer product, but they also could have moved in on that industrial space and offered a solid product with good support into a space where only the Raspberry Pi and some very small scale and niche distributors exist.
They really need a products division that is outside of their core chip division. The management styles don't translate, and again, all this does is risk damaging that brand to claim a phyrric victory over a flash in the pan.
Plus.. I hate cheap plastic PCs from builders that offer zero support or longevity in their products. Intel would have had me buying fanless NUCs for years if they stayed in the space. The price difference was _well worth it_ for me.
The new high end application for PCs is running AIs locally.
No way you can fit a 4090 in a NUC, the GPU itself is larger than a NUC, heat dissipation requirements cannot be 'optimized' away.
The business market is still figuring out the balance between lightweight machines using the cloud and beefy desktops running locally.
The issue is, Intel's aiming more upmarket (based on their pricing) for something that doesn't offer a lot more. Intel's done interesting/fun things, such as building the entire motherboard into a single slot sized unit, but going out and buying a Beelink is a better proposition for most people.
If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded. They lead the way, they begat a new form factor, and it's won. But the market has grown much more competitive, and it's hard to see what Intel would do to remain relevant & important in this market. Their current efforts are interesting, and even good, but not really enough to clearly differentiate, not enough to command a huge lead in this market, and certainly not at the somewhat above average prices Intel has been asking.
This follows a lot of other Intel examples. Intel left DRAM market in 1985. Intel left SSDs in 2020, in a similar situation to NUCs here: they basically created the mass consumer market, by pioneering NVMe & creating amazingly high-value products that used to be ultra-expensive proprietary botique items.
This seems like a classic Innovator's Dilemna situation, of Intel having a strong hand creating mass-market products that define the industry, but then being chased out by down-market competition, once the offerings really become a true everyday commodity. I'm not sure if there even is another way Intel ought to behave here.