Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…
So has there been organizational dysfunction for decades? I think not: there are things Intel has always been doing very well and post-Netburst improvements after Core 2 have also been significant.
I believe that a big element is basically luck: you invest in a certain progression path and that investment will yield results so you keep going. Another path might be sufficiently better to write off the inferior path investment but you don't know that. Perhaps the unsatisfying path taken is the least bad of all. Even Netburst improved over time, a bit, and so did whatever forgettable AMD had been building between the Athlon glory days and those of Ryzen. As long as you see progress, it's very hard to just give it up for a fresh start (that may or may not be better). We can just be lucky that a luck/lock-in imbalance has never persisted long enough to make the lucky one the only survivor, because then they would never leave the left dead-end they'll inevitable run into some day.