Amy, I understand your points, you obviously are referring to the "Its not a flaw" stance during the first Pentiums. My issue specific to Barrett is the ease he had to avoid the bad PR. I don't think he listened to his team when he got out in front of the Mid-Quarter meeting. If it was the first time I would not care, but he has done this too many times, and see 3 buck wiped off an 18 buck stock was enough for me to become convinced, and convinced now, that Barrett is not doing the best for Intel. Barrett is failing and Intel is surviving in spite of him.
Intel is making its way to becoming another Business case study. Remember DEC? Remember Wang?
The problem for Intel, which is different than the past is the life cycle of where the company is at. Its out of the Manufacturing stage and now in the Cash Cow stage. Before it was an issue just to be able to meet demand, and the low end was left to AMD. I suppose I could make and arguement its time for Intel to get their own Scully, but without a Riff like what happened with Jobs.
Since then AMD gathered up the design team of the Alpha, which gave AMD the knowledge on how to build high Megahertz chips, and how to ramp them up. The Alpha team came from Nextgen.
So today AMD has great chips, which compete with Intel one for one, the 1.5 processor lead is now gone. And Intel had to deal with the CPU as commodity. This all happened with Barrett.
Intel is head and shoulders about most of the competitors you mention, which why they have to compete against themselves. If under Barrett things keep on going as the go, they will find themselves in what I call the VCR cycle.
Look at VCRs today they cost 75 dollars for a full featured one, as opposed to 1500 15 years ago, or 300 4 years ago.
Unless they can drive a great application besides the Internet, the PC will evolved into a disposable LCD watch.
My issue with Barrett remains, that he screws up when he does not need to, and times are already hard enough.
Rgds |
