Intel CEO Paul Otellini to Retire in May

This is hard to do at scale: "* Achieved breakthrough innovations, including High-K/Metal gate and now 3-D Tri-gate transistors; and dramatic improvement in energy efficiency of Intel processors"

For people in the HN community, this is mostly horrific because it represents everything they avoid. However, for almost everyone else out there that is working for the purpose of simply providing for their families, the stability and strength of a diversified company is typically a major positive.

The thing that is always missing from the HN discussions about how bad MBAs are for a company etc. is that at the extremes of business, business becomes highly technical and requires someone who is technically proficient at business.

Knowing how to create the next high end transistor technology which maintains Moore's law is amazing, but that person is highly unlikely to keep a company of Intel's size successful.

Perhaps so... particularly in the moment. To me, it's more a question of whether that CEO is a person who once would have known how to create the next high end transistor (or whatever technology innovation is central to the business) and is still able to have that conversation as an engineer/scientist.

For instance, I doubt Andy Grove, at the end of his tenure, would have been able to do that kind of tech work in the moment, but he had a PhD in engineering and had a very deep knowledge of the technology as well as the business. He did make some very typical-of-engineers mistakes when intel decided to raise its consumer profile. And I'm not trying to bring up a debate around Andy Grove's management style (though of course, people are free to comment what they like). But it's hard to say he didn't keep the company successful, even at a very large scale.

Otellini was a successful CEO, but (I actually don't know this for sure) did he ever have the ability to do the core tech work behind intel's product?

I suppose that in this era of high profile non-tech CEO flameouts (HP, Yahoo), Otellini may actually be a counter-example that a non-technical CEO can still be quite successful.

Well they desperately want to do it anyway. Anyway by your very reasoning, they won't do high volume chips (you added embedded but it does not matter, you just can't reach the same volume as embedded chips with such higher prices). Whether they not reach that for a reason or another does not matter much; but the consequences of that fail could be hard. The desktop and server world is not going away, the x86 world also is here to stay, but there is no hard limit to the changes of market repartition that can happen even there. IBM is still very powerful with their mainframes, and Intel could follow that path for (a part of) desktops and servers, but the more they allow the ARM world to develop, the more their share is at risk on their own land in the long term.

The problem is that SoC offering not only matters now, but it even has mattered for several years, and Intel had no offering, sill has no serious one, and is probably not even going to have no serious one for several other years. For a company with such resources, this is crazy. And when you take a look at the press communicate to try to understand what they think that matter, you do not expect big changes: "operations and the cost structure" i don't know enough to judge so i give it the benefit of the doubt, "breakthrough innovations" are real important stuff, so good point here; but: - "Reinvented the PC with Ultrabook™ devices" Intel, desktops and servers, are here to stay, we agree on that. But their market share is at risk, because these markets are not isolated island. Intel won't be able to increase their prices too much, so if their market decrease too much, do the maths.