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Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

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Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#211

Post by dghughes »

darth_avocado wrote: post #191
bane wrote: post #116

Intel and Google share surprisingly similar problems: an almost pathological inability to grow lines of business with new products because they kill them off too early. In Intel's case, it's even worse, they kill them off right before the market would have made them successful. They should own the "things with semiconductors" market, but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on higher profit core chi…

> but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on higher profit You explained the core of the problem that usually gets little blame. Successful companies get infiltrated by Wall Street MBA types who make decisions for the short term to manipulate the stock price because their own compensation structures help encourage that behavior. Companies, especially like Intel should be built for being resilient o…

Like Bed, Bath and Beyond. Obsessing over their stock price and ran out of cash to buy actual things to sell. Now bankrupt.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#212

Post by sho_hn »

masklinn wrote: post #203
throwaway2037 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more? I also sense the Philips is a fading giant, but I struggle to a put a finger on it. Part of it might be that it is constantly spinning out divisions into separate companies.

They don’t just spin out divisions, they keep spinning out innovative and revenue generating divisions, leaving Philips with no ability to do anything, and with what they’re currently doing: selling the brand for Chinese white-labels to put on their product as they try to move up the chain. Essentially Philips had spent 30 years selling the bones of the group, leaving just a skin-suit. Which they’re now selling as we…

Here's a video essay on this: https://youtu.be/WE58YisgFeQ

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#213

Post by jewayne »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #172
epiccoleman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is a major unsolved problem to my eye. The cost of living in Columbus - while nowhere near the craziness of coastal cities - is steadily rising. Real estate in surrounding cities is also going up, and it's hard for me to imagine how all those working the jobs that will supposedly be created by the fabs will afford to live near them. One development in Ohio has been a proposal for a passenger rail line that…

Yeah I lived in Columbus and other parts of Ohio for 15 years or so and it strikes me as bizarre to try to bring industry back. Rubber, steel, automotive, etc. industries were absolutely massive in the 50's, 60's, 70's. But the corporate raiders of the 80s destroyed and sold off all the factories to replace them with cheaper offshore labor. The cost of living in Ohio only continued to go up and most cities in the sta…

Yeah, upper middle class people are predictably out of touch with reality. The median household income in Franklin County is only $66k. Yes, stupid zoning made building non-McMansion houses difficult, but that doesn't mean the working class just magically disappeared.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#214

Post by tstrimple »

damagednoob wrote: post #33
itsoktocry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. > offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good valu…

> Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good value"? I would argue in the same way that buying an expensive pair of boots that last longer than a cheap pair to be good value. > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space. What is the trend line and how much is that space growing by relative to other devices like mobile phone…

> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#215

Post by jackmott42 »

mucle6 wrote: post #205

I saw this post, checked their stock price, and its up 5% since yesterday?

Doing bad was expected, so the stock price was already down. The degree of badness was less bad than expected, so the price goes up a little.

The same thing often happens in reverse: "Nvidia posts record profits" and stock tanks because an even bigger record was expected.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#216

Post by AtlasBarfed »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #48
itsoktocry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. > offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good valu…

> Of course they care. If they care they sure don't act like it. Microsoft is clearly squeezing Windows users for whatever revenue is left. Nothing else explains the user hostility, backwards compatibility breaks and unending advertising and data collection.

This is the real consequence of Intel being run by MBA sociopaths for two decades now.

Intel (and AMD) needs a good consumer OS to keep it relevant in the next decades. It's what keeps the DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS on x86, and therefore use x86 server architectures. Either that, or it is a commodity ARM business.

Microsoft has never been up to the task of a good consumer OS. Intel always should have had multiple irons in the fire, and with Linux they had a built-in weaponized competing consumer OS. They delegated all leadership to Microsoft rather than keep irons in the fire. WHich is ... ok ... when MS is the big monopoly on the block. That doesn't exist anymore.

If Apple pre-iPhone produced OSX out of probably less than 100 or so engineers... Intel could have done that with 1/1,000th of their quarterly revenue. Or less! It's just spitshining an existing, working kernel, and adding a bunch of testing for the cacaphonous PC hardware/peripheral market that they were already at the nexus of.

Apple had revenues of 6 billion in 2001, the first year of OSX. Intel make 26.5 billion in "a bleak financial year".

It's not too late! It's still peanuts to do a spitpolish of Linux and do hardware testing/driver development for desktop linux! AMD or Intel (or a shared foundation) could do it! It could probably happen within a month. Partner or acquire ubuntu, or Suse, or ... anyone.

This isn't just insurance. Intel has had DECADES of frustration getting Windows to fully use/support its hardware and CPU features. A lot of the time Windows would hold people hostage by waiting a major OS release (like for USB) before supporting something.

Not with Linux. Boom, your stuff is supported as soon as you integrate it into your distro.

This is the path to a key thing that Intel doesn't realize it lost: relevance. Microsoft has decided Windows isn't really relevant. That was Intel's only path to relevance.

All the things they wanted to stay relevant in: x86 on phone, SSDs in PCs, Optane, etc. The path to that relevance was having a usable consumer OS. That you had good control over. You get your hardware demo'd and supported at maximum speed.

Don't like Linux? Well fine, pick up OpenBSD, or whatever remnant of BeOS is out there. RedoxOS? whatever.

Gelsinger probably is following a path of "get engineering" fixed. Well, ok, good strategy given how bad the MBAs fucked up everything. But Intel isn't the big daddy and that doesn't really solve the problems, it just mitigates the biggest bleeding.

Intel needs SOFTWARE RELEVANCE. Intel does not have that anymore. Intel still has the resources and marketing power to achieve that. THE WINDOW IS CLOSING FAST. Regain software relevance.

Just do SOMETHING.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#217

Post by AdrianB1 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #187

It's not actually vital for Intel as a company to survive? As long as the foundaries and designs survive. Somebody else will take the business away from them.

That is not how it works, with modern tech having the foundries and designs is not enough to fabricate products that work.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#218

Post by kgwgk »

RandomWorker wrote: post #18
drumhead wrote: post #7

This looks like some big bath accounting by Intel. Getting all the bad news out of the way in what was expected to be a bad year anyway. The next couple of years will be make or break for them, so Im expecting to see some good things coming out of their pipeline.

Doesn’t the bathing come in the form of write offs and investments? Sales decline is never good. But it’s hard to say they have any good products Ive considered buying in the past two years or so. I actively right now wouldn’t consider a pc option if it came with intel.

> Sales decline is never good.

It can make future results look better. If you don't mind reducing revenue now you may get in exchange more revenue in the future - and a more favourable baseline for growth calculations.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#219

Post by santoshalper »

Intel is well underway on the same journey that IBM took decades ago. That is the transition from a Computer Engineering company to a Financial Engineering company. This never works well. Never, ever, let an finance or sales person near the top spot at a technology company.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#220

Post by squater »

causi wrote: post #170
bane wrote: post #116

Intel and Google share surprisingly similar problems: an almost pathological inability to grow lines of business with new products because they kill them off too early. In Intel's case, it's even worse, they kill them off right before the market would have made them successful. They should own the "things with semiconductors" market, but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on higher profit core chi…

Personally I think Intel lost the plot around the time they killed Atom. Atom launched as a garbage product, then they spent a decade refining it into an incredible combination of price, performance, and power consumption. Then they killed it and replaced it with processors that offered barely 10% better performance per watt at five times the MSRP and they wonder why the Intel tablet market is dead. It's dead because…

They didn't kill off the Atom line, they just dropped the Atom naming [0][1]. They are typically also dirt cheap [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tremont_(microarchitecture)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracemont_(microarchitecture)

[2] https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-Nucbox5-Desktop-Computer-Windo...

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