I love comments like this. I don't think any other industry has this kind of sport-team mythos in the mind of the layman. If Ford or Toyota has a bad year, people think "Hmm they need to make better cars". If Intel or AMD has a bad year, people say "Clearly they need do hire that guy who was in charge when they made all those good chips". It's incredibly lazy thinking, and I love it.
Intel has had a bad 10 years. The market has more than doubled in size and yet they have grown 25%. 10 years ago Intel made more revenue than AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm combined. I bet Qualcomm passes Intel in revenue in two years. All those companies have more than doubled their revenue. AMD went from $6b to $22b. NVidia from $4b to $30b. Qualcomm $19B to $54B. Intel went from $53B to $68B with the last 2 years being flat and this year actually declining.
Intel can't execute. They are failing to shrink transistor size. Failed at a 5G modem. Failed to deliver a competitive mobile processor.
This is irrelevant. If Ford or Toyota have 10 bad years, people will not suddenly start talking about all of the superstar, legendary car designers they should pull out of book signings back onto the field.
If Ford or Toyota had a Steve Job or Elon musk they wouldn’t be in the same place.
Listen to interview with Jim Keller, yes, there is a whole team doing the work, but you need a technical/management person with the credibility and willingness to make the hard choices and take risks.
99% of people hired for CEO roles will be happy to coast, take their bonus on short time gains and move to the next opportunity. Who is willing to take risks for long term success that will not appear on the quarterly report?
You need someone who can get that job and at the same time doesn’t give a damn about what people think and about the money. Those people are rare. That’s why Apple doesn’t have ’another’ Steve Job, Apple will coast on the previous trajectory for a while, but won’t disrupt anything else major, they will play safe.
The same is true for Google, they got their own money printer going nonstop, who would be crazy enough to take risks with that?
The last disruption of Google was Gmail/GSuite and was started as a side project. How many top engineer do they have, where is all their output?
For Intel they need to disrupt their own products to move forward, that’s why it’s hard to do, you don’t want to kill the golden goose. But it’s either you now or the competition in a few years.
Man Intel was really sleeping on this one to be kicked that hard by Apple on the first release of their desktop chip.
So in a nutshell: talented engineers are everywhere in those companies, that’s not the diferenting factor, good leadership is and the incentives reward those who don’t take risks.
BTW: your comment is mostly an ad hominem with a condescending tone: mind of the laymen, incredibly lazy thinking, I love comment like this!
