Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

I see a remarkable number of people who have good personal experiences with Pat but I've got this concern.

Intel's technical failure with 10nm has gone hand-in-hand with financial success with 14nm. That is, without 10nm chips on the market in a meaningful way they've been able to raise prices for 14nm parts -- Intel put up better financial numbers than ever in a time when it has not been investing in future success.

VMWare was a big thing in 1998 but it was obsolete by the time Pat got involved -- a hypervisor is naturally part of the kernel and there is no way cloud providers are going to spend their margin on VMWare. Yes, many people in business are terrified of open source software and want a proprietary product so they have somebody to sue (VMWare) or they need somebody to hold their hand (Pivotal.) Either way, VMWare and Pivotal are units that can be merged and spun off whenever a company based in Texas (Dell) or Massachusetts (EMC) wants to look like it has a presence in San Francisco -- you see the vmware logo on CNBC every morning and somebody thinks the king is on the throne and a pound is worth a pound but that doesn't mean anything in the trenches.

Like Intel in the past 10 years, VMWare is entirely based on a harvesting business model. In the short term Intel made profits by pandering to cloud providers; but in the long term cloud providers invested their profits in better chips. (What if Southwest Airlines had developed a 737 replacement designed from the ground up for a low cost airline?)

Pat might be able to keep the game of soaking enterprise customers going for longer, but someday the enterprise customers will be running ARM and the clients will be running ARM and the coders will be thinking "did they add all of those AMX registers just to put dead space on the die to make it easier to cool?" and falling in love again with AVR8.

> How often do big companies like Apple and Intel succeed in righting a sinking ship though? You can’t keep pointing to the one guy that succeeded.

I feel like the view of Intel as a "sinking ship" is an inside-basebally misread of the situation.

If you buy a PC or a laptop or a server today, you're most likely getting an Intel CPU. It's now at least possible to buy AMD in many market segments from major vendors - and of course many of us do - but to the broader consumer and hosting world Intel still dominates.

You can look ahead and extrapolate and say "they can't compete with TSMC right now, and maybe they're going to start falling behind further." Fair analysis. But they dominate the market to an extent that's hard to overstate.

Contrast this with between-Jobs-stints Apple, which was a tiny shrinking company with a niche product and no clear strategy.

Intel is almost in too-big-to-fail territory. They aren't sinking, just because they now have real competition. Yes, they need to do "something" to maintain dominance - but why would you see their situation and conclude they won't? The new CEO here is a sign that they see the trouble ahead, and they're ready to steer around it.

Speaking as an ex-Pivot (but only for myself), a couple of thoughts:

- VMware grew almost 2.5x under Pat. Obviously their core franchise is about harvesting, but new adjacent products like NSX and VSAN helped a lot with growth. They just took a long time to get traction given the customer base, who don’t like change. VMware Cloud on AWS has been surprisingly strong even to skeptics like myself.

On the other hand, companies would get rid of VMware if they could, and they tried and failed with OpenStack. The hypervisor is commodity, but the overall compute/network/storage private cloud system isn’t trivial. Turns out “holding hands” whether by software or services is pretty valuable?

Public cloud of course is a substitute, though private clouds and data centres have survived and thrived as well (for now).

- Pivotal had a boutique software and services model that would be difficult to scale as a public company given the current shifts in the enterprise fashion away from productivity-at-any-cost (PaaS and serverless) and towards perceived low cost building blocks (Kubernetes and its ecosystem).

But it would be an gross oversimplification to suggest this was merely a vanity project for EMC and Dell. It took in $500m+ annually on open source software (and another $300m in services), which is no small feat, though still minuscule given what surrounds it. But anything new has to start somewhere. Not enough to impact the mothership’s balance sheets, but there was something special there that could be nurtured. Whether it can be, or whether the differences matter enough is anyone’s guess.

Pat could take Intel in a direction we don’t anticipate. VMware was written off for dead when Pat came on but he managed to buy it another 10-15 years and at peak a doubling of the stock price. He’s probably learned from that.

I think this is why they're in trouble.

Apple has the vertical integration to do it properly. Amazon and Microsoft have the server cloud computing to do it server side.

Without proper coordination from Microsoft, third party OEMs, and AMD they'll all fall behind on computing on end devices.

I think that's part of the reason AMD/Intel will be less relevant, the incentives and market moves don't look good for them.

A sociologist I met described it as the "generation effect" which is that people live in a cohort of other people about their same age +/-10 years. Throughout one's life the composition of the cohort changes as you begin to specialize starting with college/first job and continuing if you focus on a particular area (for me it has been systems analysis).

This effect can drive people to over-pay to go to "good schools" or work for less than they think they should be paid at the "good places to work" because it lets them join a cohort with members who are statistically more likely to be "successful" (for some arbitrary definition of success). I personally never paid much attention to it but thought about it when talking with this person.

I know from experience that it happens in Silicon Valley that someone will say, "Oh I know someone at some previous company who is really good at that, let me see if they would be willing to change jobs." That is why companies pay people bonuses for "referrals."

I suspect it happens in LA in the entertainment industry as well. If you watch the old American television series "ER"[1]. Produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment production company, it is amazing to see people who were on that show first as guest actors and then show up later in series.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108757/