Actually, I think "first non-technical CEO" probably deserves a notch on a technology company's time line. It doesn't mean that the company won't succeed, but it is a sign that it has become a different type of company (this may be more a reflection of this change than a cause).

But unlike some other high profile flame-outs, it sounds like Otellini was a success at the helm.

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.

Grove is a great example of a successful technical CEO. I would never say Otellini was a failure, but Intel flourished under Grove in a way that it didn't under Otellini.

Otellini's successor will be playing a different game, fighting ARM rather than AMD.

The Medfield chips are performance-competetive with existing parts, though they aren't stand-outs. But even if, say, they had a mythical chip that would get lets-just-say-for-argument 2x the performance of Tegra 3 or A6 at 50% of the power draw, they would still not be manufacturing it in volume, for the simple reason that Ivy Bridge cores make a whole lot more money for them than a Tegra-killer would.

So from an investor's perspective, Intel is doing exactly the right thing. Stay in the game, don't cede the market. Make sure your products are competetive, but don't walk away from easy cash either.

Long term, their success will be driven by the value of their SoC products as the desktop world dissolves. But current market penetration isn't a good indicator of what the likelihood of that value will be.

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" <- is this a joke??? - "Greatly expanded business partnerships and made strategic acquisitions that expanded Intel’s presence in security, software and mobile communications" <- ok they are talking about Intel's McAfee and other stuffs that makes no sense here - "Delivered the first smartphones and tablets for sale with Intel inside" <- okkkkk, so? huge fail here, and they do not even try to pretend they matter in this field, just that they exist, because they know they won't be forgiven if they don't. That's what we are talking about. - "Grew the vast network of cloud-based computing built on Intel products" <- not driven by them. They could as well have talked about the internet and we servers, but the fashion word of the day is cloud, so they talked about that.

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.

We can all argue that N should be higher than it actually was, but Intel's still present and accounted for.

Contra the ARM fans who seem to be dominant on HN, I think Intel is well positioned to win that battle. Cutting-edge fab capacity is a pretty big advantage, even if they're using it mostly for high-power CPUs at the moment.

The 62 Core Xeon Phi has 5 billion transistors. Divided by that number is: 149. That's a bit low. The Intel 8080 that came out in 1974 (when he joined the company) had 4,500 transistors. Looks like Moore's law has been slowing down a bit in recent years. Probably due to the focus on reduced energy usage.

EDIT: It works out if you replace "18 months" by "24 months". Revised value: 2^(38/2) = 524288. Impressive still.

Which calculator are you using? Does it use a Pentium CPU with the famous division bug perhaps? :)

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"

Please just bring him back as CEO.

On the whole, I would say most of my engineer colleagues approve of Paul's leadership, MBA or otherwise :).

It will be interesting to see if Intel's next CEO decides to take any exciting new turns. Particularly with respect to the PC market, we live in interesting times.

tldr; you're an ass.

Edit: Thanks to those who pointed out that I'd forgotten the Chromebooks and Google TV. Given the limited extent to which Google have marketed these devices, I'm not sure whether they can be said to have failed yet. And even if they have failed, it is not clear that this was due to using Intel components.

This is also a very bad strategic mistake because if Intel succeeds in mobile, and becomes popular, who do you think it will help most? Google? No way. That situation would help Microsoft, because they can start using the x86 chips that got popular on Android to promote their x86 tablets and hybrids, where Microsoft has a real strength because of legacy apps.

So Google is now pushing Intel chips into the market, and gaining who knows what, because I don't see any benefit for them, but definitely helping Microsoft in the long term. If Intel survives, Microsoft survives. You'd think Google would realize that and doesn't want that.

Google has absolutely no need for Intel in the future, even for their data centers. Microsoft's future pretty much depends on Intel and x86 chips. I don't understand why Google isn't taking full advantage of this weakness of their competitor, and instead it's trying to put Intel back in the game.

With that said, Intel has been way too slow in its race against ARM, but saying that this has impacted Google I don't find credible.

So, Intel is/was a part of the problem at least for Chromebooks. (I don't know anything about Google TV)