more Intel bad news

Seems unlikely. DEC essentially ignored personal computers. Intel isn't making that kind of mistake - it's a big player in a complicated market, and while it clearly didn't make the right choices in the automotive business market, there are lots of other markets where it still seems to be doing well.

They're outsourcing marketing to Accenture. Surely marketing should be a core competency for any substantial company? You need to understand the product and the customers, and I can't see how a third party agency is going to do that better than the company itself?

Ah, Accenture has an AI. That makes it alright then. All fine, most fine, nothing to see here.

Intel doesn't need PR or marketing; they need good semiconductors.

Intel spent $110 billion on stock buybacks that they should have spent on technology.

They messed up phones, DRAM, flash, CISC, RISC, ARM, EUV, FPGAs, and a bunch of other stuff. They are run by rich moron bean counters now. When your compensation is mostly the value of your stock options, complicated things like transistors are an annoyance.

Build a better mouse-trap and the world will beat a path to your door.

This rather ignores the difficulty of working out what a "better mousetrap" would look like to your potential customers, and how you would draw it to the attention of the potential customers who might want to buy it if they could be made aware of what it might do for them.

In your ever-so-expert opinion.

Bean-counting mostly works - more often in a relatively mature technology. Your list of things that they "messed up" is a bit strange - I was in England when "ARM" was being invented.

Intel was always a customer for EUV lithography, and quite how Philips ended up doing so well with it (ASML is a Philips spin-off) is a bit of a mystery. Philips had an electron-beam microfabricator business, and messed it up badly enough that they sold it off to Cambridge Instruments. The machine was fine, but the customer service wasn't good enough.

Not when they are your entire business.

They did:

Philips was good at optics (lighting, medical imaging, LCDs) and the semiconductor research divisions were really good. Another company to add to the list of messes.

Exactly.

Theo

Intel kicked in a billion or so to help ASML buy Cymer for the tin-droplet EUV source. Then they failed to invest in the machines for their own fabs.

Meanwhile Intel kept buying back their own shares. That's like trying to grow by eating your own legs; it doesn't scale. [1]

Intel lost a heap on Altera too, ballpark 8 billion. They lost our business too; now we use mostly Efinix and some Xilinx SOCs.

The pattern seems to be that Intel chases fads and always messes them up. That will become business school courses some day.

Philips had their "Nat Lab" - natural philosophy laboratory, for academic physics, and other pure science stuff - from way back.

The process of getting from pure science to saleable technology didn't always run smoothly, but they did have some notable successes.

My wife and I lived and worked in the Netherlands from 1993 to 2012 and we did have some contact with that.

But it's great for people who owned a lot of Intel shares (or stock options).

I never did like the Altera programmable parts. I was much more taken with the Philips Cool-Runner parts that they sold to Xilinix, not that that I ever managed to design them into anything that sold.

Everybody in the semi-conductor business chases fads. Somebody always ends up doing the fad better than everybody else, so most of the competition has always messed up. Intel is still in business - unlike DEC - so they haven't messed up completely.

Three merchants marooned on a island who got immensely rich by trading hats is the classical example.