Intel CEO Craig Barrett is hopping mad about things going wrong at Intel all the time. “Barrett says he has spoken “bluntly and directly” to his senior managers about these problems, but we don’t believe this will help. It is the plan that is at fault and not the execution,” writes analyst Ashok Kumar in his report today. I think Kumar is being very polite.
Barrett wants executive to shape-up or ship out. Well how about he himself leaving the building? He was supposed to be the guy who was a manufacturing maven, a stickler for execution. How about taking some of the blame himself. After all it is on his watch that Intel’s telecom adventures have cost about $10 billion in write-offs! Canceling an entire processor roadmap? Almost all of the major new products within the Intel Architecture business unit during 2004 have been late or flawed in some respect. Here is a recap of what has gone wrong, and what it means for the most dominant chip company on the planet!
- Tejas cancellation
- delays and a recall of the desktop Grantsdale chipset
- the delayed launch of Dothan
- substantial delay for the Alviso mobile chipset
- ongoing overproduction of slower Prescott processors
- a flaw in the Lindenhurst server chipset
- the delay of the 4GHz Prescott until 1Q05
(I will do update this later in the week!)
Add another 1.6B$ for DSPC
What’s wrong with Intel is that they are on the wrong side of Moore’s law. All their products are basically in overshoot status, and Qualcomm (a low capital, high profit, fabless chip provider) is going to eat their lunch.
Two years from now, Intel will have all the appeal of a one-hit wonder from the previous decade on wall street.
IBM and AMD are hitting them hard on the top end, and Qualcomm and VIA are moving into the low end.
PS. And frankly INTC deserves this because they bastardized the USB protocol by making it host based, not peer-peer based like Firewire or the internet.
PSS. No intel chips were used in the production of this post!!!
Charlie, I think Intel, like Microsoft suffers from the two biggest problems any company has to face – old age. They cannot let go of the past and have to maintain their presence in the computer chip buisness, but this prevents them to fully strike out in other directions. Microsoft has struggled with their expansion plans and so have other companies. You really need to have the balls to bet your company’s future on a new technology. I think that is why one has to give much respect to Texas Instruments who took a painful and risky gamble on DSPs and now look where they are.
Intel is moving towards communications as PC hardware gets commoditized. The investments by Intel Capital and its stakes in WiMax are a testimony to it. Two decades back, Intel moved from memory to microprocessors. It needs to move to communications but it is going to stray into strongholds of TI, Broadcom and Qualcomm. The shift is going to be daunting and shaky.
And they have been a colossual faliure in communications. Look it is a different kind of approach a company needs to take when it goes after comm market. INtel doesnot have it in its DNA