[HN Gopher] Intel Financialized and Lost Leadership in Semicondu...
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Intel Financialized and Lost Leadership in Semiconductor
Fabrication
Author : kloch
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-03-17 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ineteconomics.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ineteconomics.org)
| Afforess wrote:
| Fun fact, Stock buybacks were largely illegal until 1982:
|
| https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/10/23/the-dangers-of-bu....
| ls612 wrote:
| Stock buybacks are economically equivalent to dividends, with
| the one exception that they don't trigger a taxable event.
| bin_bash wrote:
| ...isn't that the reason they were illegal? It seems you're
| implying not triggering a taxable event isn't important.
| sokoloff wrote:
| They don't trigger a taxable event for shareholders who
| continue to hold the shares. They (obviously) trigger a
| taxable event (and a more concentrated one) for the sellers
| of the shares which were bought back.
| mortehu wrote:
| They also offset shares created for stock based
| compensation. It's common for the number of outstanding
| shares to increase even in quarters companies do buybacks,
| because stock based compensation is bigger than the
| buybacks.
|
| Since newly issued shares are not tax deductible for the
| owners, you'd basically be paying tax even if net zero
| capital is returned.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think the primary concern was stock price manipulation.
| There are some safeguards in place that prevent that from
| being too big of an issue.
|
| The tax-free dividend is more of a modern discovery, I
| think. Which is why the loophole hasn't been closed yet.
| gok wrote:
| (2021)
|
| In general you can tell someone is full of shit if they use the
| term "financialize" and this article is certainly no exception.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Exactly. Ctrl-F "EUV" in the article and notice nothing comes
| up.
|
| Intel made a couple very bad engineering decisions and fell
| behind on process technology. That's it. Share repurchases have
| nothing to do with it.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I take it to mean that financial gain is priority one.
|
| All other considerations secondary.
|
| Crew expendable.
| klelatti wrote:
| Whilst having a degree of sympathy with the point being made here
| I think that the underlying issue is mainly with Intel's failure
| to establish attractive propositions in mobile and GPUs whilst
| they had process leadership - and these failures aren't really as
| a result of low spend on R&D or Capex.
| randomsilence wrote:
| This reads as if innovation can simply be bought. Why should
| Intel be able to buy back leadership when China is trying the
| same without much success?
| chmod600 wrote:
| Give profits to investors, or reinvest? That seems like the main
| issue, more so than "manipulation".
|
| Of course if you give profits to investors, that allows room for
| others to out-invest you.
|
| But the assumption throughout the article is that, if Intel had
| reinvested, it would have been a good investment. That's far from
| clear, given that we know how wasteful organizations can get when
| they are top dog and flush with cash.
| gleenn wrote:
| And this is why AMD and Apple are eating their lunch now. I'm
| super happy Intel is going to build a next gen fab though, mostly
| because I'm concerned about the imminent threat of China taking
| over Taiwan and TSMC with it.
| bin_bash wrote:
| It seems both Intel and Boeing had similar paths. They were
| engineering-first companies that were transformed into profit
| seeking and while they made a lot of money initially, eventually
| it failed for both of them.
|
| My takeaway is that working hard to build quality products is
| more likely to be profitable than working hard to make money.
| ww520 wrote:
| GE is another example.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I see you also watched a certain Netflix documentary recently
| :-D
| bckr wrote:
| Which documentary talks about this?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| That ignores the fact that older businesses tend to
| financialize to drive growth in equity value once revenue has
| stopped growing _and_ older companies tend to be the most prone
| to disruption /failure.
|
| Intel's downfall can be tied back to an org structure that made
| up for bad gate-level architecture choices with proprietary
| fabrication techniques. All that customization crushed intel's
| ability to compete with TSMC in foundry and the lack of
| architectural discipline prevented them from even coming close
| to fast-following QCOM SoCs or NVDA GPUs.
|
| Keep in mind, for all the talk of Intel's bad management and
| over-financialization, BK was a foundry engineer and he oversaw
| the worst period of decline.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Older companies are more likely to be disrupted, but younger
| companies are more prone to failure (per unit time).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| bsder wrote:
| > My takeaway is that working hard to build quality products is
| more likely to be profitable than working hard to make money.
|
| Except that it isn't.
|
| "Manufacturing" has known limits. You need this many people to
| make this many things and your things sell for this much. There
| is growth, but the values are limited. And, if the company is
| dying, it is a very slow process and can still generate a
| remarkable amount of cash while doing so.
|
| "Financialization" has no such limits. The sky is the limit and
| can do so really quickly. So, it looks great. Your gains can be
| close to infinite.
|
| Unfortunately, quick and infinite can also describe your
| _losses_ from "financialization".
|
| This killed Westinghouse. It also crippled GE quite heavily.
| There are many other examples.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow your argument because you appear to
| disagree, but then support, the premise :) So I'm probably
| misreading.
|
| But ISTM that the thing with constrained environments like
| manufacturing is that the constraints are physical, so
| _everyone_ is constrained, which means that in a highly
| competitive environment, all viable players should be
| optimising and striving to work on the edge of what's
| possible, in order to maximise competitiveness and
| profitability.
|
| So in such an environment, it's absolutely necessary to "work
| hard to build quality products", just to remain in the game.
| If you instead direct your resources to something else (like
| financialisation) at the expense of building great products
| then you will fall behind the leading edge and become
| uncompetitive or, perhaps worse, a commodity player.
|
| This certainly seems to be what happened at Intel, and also
| Boeing, both of whom appear to have fallen well back from the
| edge of what's possible.
|
| I think the main reason financialisation is easier to do than
| engineering, is because money is a universal language, and
| Verilog is most certainly not. Shareholders seem to invest in
| order to make money from transactions, rather than dividends,
| and this seems to be a structural flaw in the financial
| system.
| danuker wrote:
| > You need this many people to make this many things and your
| things sell for this much.
|
| Speaking with no manufacturing experience, but having read
| some books (Diamandis' Abundance).
|
| You can reduce long-term costs by automating. If each week
| you buy a robot replacing a human, your operational costs go
| down permanently. That is because robots are fundamentally
| cheaper than human time.
|
| Of course, you have to foresee the demand that would make it
| possible to recoup the costs.
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| Money is not a good motivator:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
| teej wrote:
| Seems like we haven't learned from the downfall of General
| Electric.
| threatripper wrote:
| Investors can take Intel dividends now and invest them in AMD
| stocks for future profit and be better off in the end. The only
| people losing are those who expect a secure job until
| retirement at Intel.
| ska wrote:
| > working hard to build quality products is more likely to be
| profitable than working hard to make money.
|
| This seems like a short-term vs long-term thing. You are often
| going make more money in the short term by chasing the money
| (e.g. financialization); but if you aren't careful you will
| undermine the core value of your company.
|
| It's pretty clear that people have made many companies more
| profitable by this sort of approach, at least for a while.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Especially when your core business is making airplanes!
| api wrote:
| Financialization has done this to the entire country to varying
| degrees.
| amelius wrote:
| > My takeaway is that working hard to build quality products is
| more likely to be profitable than working hard to make money.
|
| For big companies. For individuals it might not be the case.
| Hence why we see this happening.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Boeing won't have failed until someone starts a competing
| company that stands a chance of replacing it. (Airbus is the
| same thing, very corporate, very closely tied to governments,
| but in Europe).
| speed_spread wrote:
| Because of regulatory capture, any competitor will have to be
| even _more_ subsidized than Boeing is.
|
| A few years ago, Bombardier introduced a new plane, the
| C-Series. Even though it did not immediately compete with
| Boeing's own offering, Boeing successfully lobbied for an
| extravagant 300% import tariffs to be be applied which killed
| the primary market (US) for it. Canadian government folded
| and essentially gave the otherwise technically successful
| project to Airbus in the hope of salvaging any industrial
| returns on eventual mass production. The airplane is now
| known as the A220.
|
| Any would-be competitor will not only be fighting Boeing, but
| the whole US government.
| acchow wrote:
| > Boeing successfully lobbied for an extravagant 300%
| import tariffs to be be applied
|
| Doesn't this violate NAFTA?
| speed_spread wrote:
| Not just NAFTA. From Wikipedia:
|
| > On 10 January 2018, the Canadian government filed a
| complaint at the World Trade Organization against the US.
|
| > On 26 January 2018, the four USITC commissioners
| unanimously determined that US industry is not threatened
| and no duty orders will be issued, overturning the
| imposed duties. The Commission public report was made
| available by February 2018. On March 22, Boeing declined
| to appeal the ruling. While the USITC had determined
| there was no threat, the ruling came too late for
| Bombardier, as the dumping petition by Boeing had already
| paved the way for Bombardier to relinquish a controlling
| interest in the CSeries to Airbus in October 2017.
|
| This is just a repeat of the Avro Arrow story. US
| demanding free trade from everyone and then just bullying
| its weight around when someone comes along with a better
| deal than what they can manage.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Free trade, free speech, free markets... but we're free
| to change the rules when it suits us, too.
| acchow wrote:
| Canada is already experiencing a constant brain drain to
| the US - there just not enough Canadian success stories
| to stay around for. And finally this Bombardier success
| comes along and the US kills it. Why aren't Canadians
| more mad?
| xxpor wrote:
| Because if the US stopped buying Canadian oil they'd be
| screwed.
| imglorp wrote:
| There's a raft of product failures across the board. Not
| making saleable product is kind of a problem. Boeing's been
| working on Starliner since 2010 and it has yet to carry
| anyone to the ISS. Then there's MAX. And the SLS (which
| hasn't failed yet but /will/ be a 4 billion disposable
| program, at best.)
|
| Maybe true, it's business profitable, successfully extracting
| money from airlines and government contracts.
| mywittyname wrote:
| In the past 15 years, it's been demonstrated that startups
| can successfully build cars at scale and commercial rocket
| ships.
|
| No company is safe. Boeing is exactly the type of company
| that won't know they're dying until they are dead.
| echelon wrote:
| > No company is safe. Boeing is exactly the type of company
| that won't know they're dying until they are dead.
|
| Yes, but they're in a sufficiently protected region of
| state space guarded by landscape difficulty, moats, massive
| contracts and cash flows, the government, you name it.
|
| You can't just build a better plane from zero and
| immediately start taking orders. You have to start with
| something small, tangential, and then grow into that
| market. That's still very hard to do in aerospace because
| the requirement is "don't kill people" yet the problem
| involves putting people in mortal danger.
|
| I don't doubt that it could happen, but I think it's a very
| tall order.
| Melatonic wrote:
| A certain car and spaceship building entrepreneur I could
| see taking a pretty big chunk of Boeings pie if they
| wanted to expand or split off in that direction
| miketery wrote:
| Bombardier had a superior product and had a massive sale to
| Delta lined up. Boeing came in with the government and added
| 300% tariff. Talk about "free market."
| speed_spread wrote:
| Yeah, fuck the new Boeing. Now everytime I'm forced to sit
| in a 737 I try to fart as much as possible.
| jonnycoder wrote:
| thanks
| p1necone wrote:
| Part of the cause is that the people doing this still benefited
| - if you can cut a bunch of costs and bump profits for the next
| few years it doesn't matter to you as an executive whether
| those changes ultimately lead to significantly worse outcomes
| for the company in the longer term.
|
| Brand loyalty takes a while to fade, there seems to be a cycle
| with a large number of successful companies that goes
|
| work honestly to build a good product
|
| -> generate brand loyalty
|
| -> people with integrity get replaced by people who would have
| had no chance of building that successful product/company in
| the first place
|
| -> cut as many corners as possible while riding the brand
| loyalty to more short term profits
|
| -> eventually, on the scale of decades sometimes (because
| people take a /long/ time to realize that 'well known brand'
| !== quality), get out-competed by a small company building the
| same thing as you with integrity
|
| -> return to step one with new company.
| Pxtl wrote:
| How many folks out there got burned by HP products when they
| were hip-deep in that step 3 step 4 zone of "strip-mine your
| own brand reputation selling cheap crap"?
| civilized wrote:
| Maybe I'm revealing my youth here, but... when was HP good?
| dhdc wrote:
| Before the 2000s or the Agilent spin-off, HP was the
| undisputed king in electronics test equipments. Their
| flagship multimeter HP3458a, launched more than 30 years
| ago, is still the standard in metrology. And Keysight
| (spin-off from Agilent) is still making them with little
| to no significant modifications over the years.
|
| They also made some great RPN calculators.
| tigershark wrote:
| Do you have any non HP printer from 20 years ago still
| working as expected?
| roland35 wrote:
| Not 20, but my 10 year old HP color laser is working as
| well as new!
| gh02t wrote:
| HP was legendary in electronic test equipment and early
| computers, calculators etc. Look on Ebay for HP branded
| power supplies or multimeters, for instance, and you'll
| see that they still command very high prices. And it's
| not collectors buying them AFAIK, it's mostly people
| _using_ them-- even 30 or 40 year old gear. They spun off
| the test equipment division as Agilent (which still
| exists and is highly respected under then name Keysight)
| around the time their computing division started to go
| downhill.
| WWLink wrote:
| This is all true. I always hated their deskjet printers,
| though. The First one I had was a Deskjet 500 and that
| thing was a massive turd with very expensive ink
| cartridges, and no matter how many times I cleaned the
| rollers, it'd still have issues not being able to feed
| paper. Shit design.
| jdkee wrote:
| LaserJet III.
| tigershark wrote:
| I don't feel burned honestly.. A HP printer that I have is
| probably 8 years old, another one is about 20 years old and
| they are both still working as expected. (The 20 years old
| now feels slower than my grandmother drawing, but it was
| expected at the time)
| cheriot wrote:
| This is why I think we need to figure out executive
| compensation. Boards just rubber stamp whatever the CEO
| wants.
|
| Tie their compensation to real goals and require them to hold
| for the next 10 years.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| What do you mean "we"? Like government intervention? These
| are private companies, if they don't want to change this
| aspect, there's not a lot you can do aside from getting on
| the board...
| bckr wrote:
| > What do you mean "we"?
|
| Perhaps people who are interested in building great
| companies, like the regulars of a tech startup-centric
| forum
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The real defense against this dynamic is the takeover bid.
| If you think the existing board and CEO are doing a poor
| job of running the company by neglecting growth
| opportunities, you can literally buy out the existing
| shareholders' position and be in charge. If you're right,
| you'll reap the gain in the form of increased valuation for
| the shares you bought.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| My understanding is that both Boeing and Intel have received
| significant subsidies and bailouts from the federal government
| when it became apparent the companies had issues. So I'd argue
| that this an indication of a management success, not a failure.
| They've been able to externalize some of their costs to the
| federal government, thus increasing their profits.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| It just demonstrates why nationalization should have been
| done instead. It was the right solution in 2008, too.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Exactly. Governments shouldn't bail out any corporation
| without a hefty share of ownership in exchange. We did it
| for Sallie Mae, and we can do it for Intel, Boeing, and the
| airlines.
| clairity wrote:
| no, we the people via our governmental apparatus should
| essentially force bankruptcy early enough (like the FDIC
| does for failing banks) and sell the assets in a widely-
| held auction (for fair price discovery), so that a
| competitor can keep customers from facing undue
| externalized risk, and creditors and employees can be
| made whole, while owners take a bath on their equity. the
| fundamental downside of taking risk has to exist for
| economies to keep moving towards efficiency (which our
| economy is frustratingly not because of said
| financializations and the like).
| brokencode wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment. And if you let companies
| fail, then you open the market for leaner, meaner
| companies to acquire their assets and build better
| products.
|
| As it is, we keep some of these giant companies on life
| support for years or decades, allowing them to crowd out
| competition with their sheer size, while also failing to
| really produce good products that serve their customers.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| The thing is the downside of risk taking still exists. It
| just shifts from an individual risk(the corporation) to
| an existential risk(a big chunk of the economy).
|
| The only way to prohibit this would be to cap the maximum
| size of a corporation. My guess is lawyers would just
| come up with some legal novelty to work around this in no
| time at all.
| brokencode wrote:
| We need to enforce antitrust laws, or make new laws if
| those aren't sufficient. Large companies have insane
| levels of control over our lives, and it's not healthy
| for society. Just look at Facebook and Google's
| stranglehold on information, or Apple's 30% fees on most
| iOS app revenue.
| clairity wrote:
| "...It just shifts from an individual risk(the
| corporation) to an existential risk(a big chunk of the
| economy)."
|
| but that's the point of the early-enough forced
| bankruptcy - to salvage value and re-internalize the
| downside risk to owners only.
|
| i'm totally down with limiting corporate size, not via a
| direct statute to that effect, but via a high-functioning
| antitrust department along with severely progressive
| taxes. you can get as big as you want, as long as you can
| internalize all the downside risk of being 'too big to
| fail'.
| gumby wrote:
| It is a success, but merely a short term success. Boeing,
| Intel, GM, and GE went from being blue chips suitable as buy-
| and-hold for a retirement account to being simply high priced
| penny stocks.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| On paper Intel is still a very solid company in a dominant
| market position (albeit that market is not necessarily a
| growing one). It still has great margins and 6-7x higher
| net income compared to AMD. And has arguably caught up with
| AMDs CPUs this year. Despite that it's market cap is almost
| the same as AMD's. So if you believe Intel can successfully
| reform itself (maybe not an easy sell, but not totally
| inconceivable they have all the tools they need for that)
| it's a great stock which is criminally undervalued.
| vkou wrote:
| In a world where TSLA's (P/E 177) market cap is 15 times
| that of GM (P/E 6), despite GM selling 6 times more cars,
| I'm not sure that I'd piss on GM as the 'overpriced penny
| stock'.
|
| There are supply chains disruptions. Some car manufacturers
| have been heavily affected by them. Some have not. Unless
| you think that these supply chain disruptions will continue
| for the next 20 years, it's bit too early to declare the
| firms hit by them dead in the water.
| rr808 wrote:
| Intel is doing badly recently, but it still generates a lot of
| cash and lives in a world with chip shortages everywhere. It says
| its going to invest in new fabs, surely it can catch up with TSM
| and SEC if it tried. It seems like an industry with so much
| potential, how can it fail?
| acchow wrote:
| Remember Nokia?
| mlindner wrote:
| Nokia had it's business area erased. Nokia is closer to what
| happened to IBM, not Intel. It wasn't outcompeted by
| companies doing the exact same thing.
| bin_bash wrote:
| My understanding as an outsider to chipmaking is that Intel's
| model involved repurposing old fabs so they could make new ones
| out of the old. TSMC's model is to keep using the same fab for
| years and years.
|
| Because the chip shortage is largely for older, cheaper
| silicon, Intel's model doesn't allow for building the chips
| that are actually needed right now.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I think the other elephant in the room that not many are
| talking about is that we have reached a point where most
| people do not need the latest and great CPU anymore - many
| can still get by with something 5 years+ old. In the old days
| stagnation like this could have been a death sentence for
| Intel but modern times are much more forgiving if they can
| still play catchup eventually.
| michaelt wrote:
| Isn't that just a sign that Intel hasn't managed to make
| any compelling products?
| erichocean wrote:
| The adoption of financial capitalism has been a disaster for the
| United States of America.
| kurthr wrote:
| It's a good point, but a little old in the tooth and not really
| fair apples-apples comparison Foundry to IDM. Intel's transistor
| density at "10nm" is closer to industry "7nm". Really, I think it
| was the desire to continue multi-patterning rather than go with
| ASML's expensive EUV equipment for a last generation. Bad bet!
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| July 2021
| morganslaw wrote:
| I think financialization is something you do in the later stages
| of a company's lifecycle. It is how you extract the most value
| out of the company as money, rather than potential.
|
| I think companies have pretty clear life cycles. First they
| start, they grow, then the plateau, and then fall. Sometimes you
| may get a few bumps in the road, but generally this is the long-
| term cycle.
|
| Financialization makes the most sense to engage when when you are
| plateaued and possibly falling. You can still extract value.
|
| I think that the fall of Sears was a great example of the
| financialization and extraction of value of a dying company.
|
| Financialization is trading off future potential growth or even
| long-term staying power for $$$.
| asah wrote:
| Yyy - see Microsoft starting in the late 90s...
| acchow wrote:
| How does a company like Apple even fit into this? Grow,
| plateau, fall, rise from the dead?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > fall
|
| Presumably what we saw as "fall" from the outside was Apple
| pouring hundreds of millions of $$$ into building M1, fixing
| design flaws in newer MacBook Pro lines etc.,
| acchow wrote:
| err I was referring to the 1980s and 90s long after the
| wild success of the Apple II
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Heh sorry.
|
| Reading various accounts it indeed was a precarious
| situation for Apple which could have gone either way.
| ayngg wrote:
| I think it is the fate of companies that got big on innovation,
| but lost their edge because they got too far ahead and
| priorities shifted. They lose their ability to be innovative as
| others catch up so they have to find other ways to give
| shareholders value.
| zwieback wrote:
| Generally I agree, but:
|
| > I think companies have pretty clear life cycles
|
| I think it's not that clear. Where I work (hp) you could argue
| we're like Intel: large public company, shareholder oriented,
| buybacks, etc. However, we've also gone through a series of
| consolidations, split-ups, spin-offs and so on. At this point
| our own company and all our cousins and step-children all have
| bits and pieces of a whole bunch of different companies.
|
| Also, I'm not sure why a blue-chip company can't just keep on
| existing. We pay a lot of dividends to keep our investors
| happy, which means less is available for R&D. That doesn't mean
| there's no R&D, though, the challenge for a CEO managing a
| company like this is to balance the two competing demands.
| Competitors that aren't focussed on crowd-sourced shareholder
| demands can make disastrous decisions more easily.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Blue chip companies need to get better at spinning off
| internal units into startups.
|
| Every blue chip that I've worked at had internal products
| that someone eventually founds a startup to copy. Sometimes,
| it's even an internal employee that leaves to start the new
| business.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I might be misremembering my history but I sn't that how
| Intel started? As a spin off from disgruntled Fairchild
| employees?
| narush wrote:
| Doesn't this feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy? It's like
| saying "if things are going bad, then just try and extract
| value."
|
| But if extracting value makes things go bad, then it pretty
| much leads to a death spiral.
|
| I feel like a more helpful framework is: if you're giving up on
| competing, then financialize, while recognizing that a) it's
| probably gonna kill your company, and b) value extraction from
| users [especially those who have little choice in using your
| products!] is no fun for anyone!
| mywittyname wrote:
| Sometimes there's not much you can do. It can be the case
| that, you know business as you know it will end and that no
| level of investment into a replacement will yield a
| competitive product (i.e., tube tvs to LED/Plasma, movie
| rental places, etc).
|
| Even innovation powerhouses can eventually fall. Those that
| stick around often shed the business units that made them
| successful initially (GE). One good way to extend the life of
| a company is to acquire your eventual replacements before
| they get a shot at you.
|
| Business is hard, and most profitable businesses have a shelf
| life.
| jart wrote:
| Death spiral? Their stock looks OK. My Core i9 still goes so
| fast. But for the past few years, if you only read Internet
| comments, you'd think Intel is about to go belly up tomorrow.
| This same thing happened twenty years ago. For example:
|
| > NYTimes - Nov 29, 2004 -- The Disco Ball of Failed Hopes -
| Intel, giant computer chip maker, seems to have lost its way
| lately; has publicly ... including the 25 percent decline in
| Intel's stock price this year
|
| As far as I can tell, things are pretty good for the
| Intel/AMD duopoly. AMD's stock is up 1000% in the last five
| years. Right now AMD is on top. Just like how AMD was on top
| around 2004. Then after a few years of AMD winning, Intel
| turned it around and became on top again. It's like democrats
| and republicans.
| nimish wrote:
| You could see this happen in real-time as Intel sold essentially
| the same processor between 2015 and 2020 stuck on 14nm while
| increasing prices and lowering quality -- replacing solder with
| thermal paste, sticking with 4 cores as long as possible to
| maximize $.
|
| You can see the rather large change under Gelsinger:
| https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/stock_buyback
| Melatonic wrote:
| Those 2015 processors were some damn good processors though -
| at that point they were quite far ahead. I haven't counted
| Intel out of the game just yet like many here seem to - they
| have definitely hit a stumble though for sure.
| morelish wrote:
| This is interesting to wonder why Intel stumbled so much and has
| lost so much ground. I suspect the basic premise of this article
| - that C-level were focused on share price rather than innovation
| - probably explains it as well as any one thing can.
| adfgadfgaery wrote:
| I have always been confused by these issues of corporate
| governance. All these things seem like they should be owned by
| _real human beings_ , but it is impossible for me to understand
| who actually owns and controls these companies. They are
| simultaneously treated as their own entities that make their own
| decisions while also being completely controlled by a few big
| shareholders. And often these shareholders are themselves
| companies, perhaps owned by other companies. And then you get
| weird stuff like Porsche's attempt to purchase VW, which wound up
| with VW purchasing its own largest shareholder. It's all
| incomprehensibly far removed from what the goods and services
| that are the real purpose of our economy.
|
| Also, the CPU in the picture is upside down. Maybe this is a
| shallow criticism (especially since the picture was probably
| chosen by an editor), but I am reluctant to listen to people who
| would make such a basic mistake.
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