People Hate Success
"This whole episode of Intel spreading FUD themselves and paying people to spread FUD under disguise of independent analysis just reminds people why they Intel is hated almost as much as Microsoft."
Intel is indeed hated. Microsoft is hated. When IBM was king, they were hated.
This hatred comes from resentment of success.
Take Microsoft, for example. No one is forced to use MS products. Several good alternatives exist: BSD, Linux, Mac OS, etc. (I've been happy using Macs since 1986.) No one is forced to use MS languages, or MS spreadsheets, or MS word processors. Alternatives abound. The government, for example, when it was attempting to break up MS was using AND SPECIFYING AS A REQUIREMENT MS products, notably Microsoft Office. Why weren't they using one of the many alternatives, ranging from FrameMaker to WordPerfect to Star Office?
Lots of people say they "hate" Microsoft, but they still keep buying.
(BTW, I have Windows 98 SE running under Virtual PC 5 under OS X, a fully modern BSD- and Mach-based OS, essentially the descendent of NeXTStep and OpenStep. I'm pleased as punch with my computing situation. I don't need to use VPC very often, truth be told.)
Back to Intel. People "hate" Intel for what are essentially psychological reasons. Nietzsche put his finger on it: the most corrosive emotion is "resentment," the desire to drag down others who have achieved some level of success. Closely related to envy, and the basis of Marx's "class struggle."
In this particular class struggle, Jerry Sanders would obviously dearly love to become the next Intel. Except he's no Bob Noyce, no Gordon Moore, no Andy Grove, and not even a Craig Barrett. He's a marketing gun who has done a reasonably good job of keeping AMD from crashing on the rocks over the past 30 years...Athlon saved his bacon (kudos to the NexGen team).
But where's the leadership even remotely comparable to what Intel innovated over those same 30 years? Dynamic RAMs, EPROMs, the microprocessor, the development system, several major architectures, manufacturing "tricks" (secrets) that were the envy of the chip industry, and the world-class manufacturing that vaulted Intel to become the #1 chip producer in the world? Where's anything comparable with AMD except "Athlon--a pretty good competitor to Pentium"?
Nietzsche nailed it. You guys hate Intel because it's successful. Same reason so many people hate Microsoft. Like Marx, you think things will be different if the top dog is dethroned and replaced by some dictatorship of the proletariat. What you miss is obvious:
-- If Microsoft were to be broken up and parted out, as Scott McNealy and Ray Noorda and Larry Ellison want, all that will happen is that one of _them_ will do everything he can to clamber to the top. (Actually, I think Noorda is now out of the picture...but a new bunch of yapping dogs is appearing, like the guy who runs Liberate...he's also clamoring for MS to be punished.)
And like it or not, Bill Gates is more of a technical guy (in a lot of ways) that marketing guys like McNeally and Ellison are. Be careful what you wish for.
-- If Intel is broken up (fat chance, given recent FTC/EU decisions), a geriatric Jerry Sanders will be lording it over his faithful followers. No change, except Jerry is a marketing guy who rarely pushed for any kind of innovation at AMD.
Be careful what you wish for...you may live to regret getting it.
--Tim May |
