To: jackrabbit who wrote (100438 ) 3/7/2000 2:25:00 PM From: nihil Read Replies (1) | Respond to
IMO that's the problem. You will notice that everyone is facing problems with finding first rate personnel. Intel's problem, according to Barrett, is getting good people to stick in microprocessors (where there have been blunders). Smart people want to get into the new divisions where the battle for the future will be fought and won or loss). Intel has enormous advantages in mpu's but has trouble outperforming AMD (who is still broke an deeply in debt). Mpu's is an "old economy" sector. The first of the new old economy sectors. Every graduate student in microelectronics can design a "better" chip and, most important, can find someone to back his new company. Who knows -- one of them might hit and leave Intel with a bunch of expensive fabs. Same thing goes for flash. In DSP chips TI and Lucent are far ahead of Intel. Competition there may well be suicidal, but Intel has to try. Web hosting ought to be a gold mine, Exodus overcharges but does Intel really have the expertise it needs to thrive? Intel has managed to make ethernet cards a profitless sector and ruined 3Com w/o making itself rich. Now its going to pop them on the mpu and kill the entire business off. Intel has to destroy the profitability of some industries to enter them. It has a long history of this. Remember there were as many as 6 other licensed to make 8088's (at IBM's behest). Operation Crush was needed for Intel to survive the threat from Motorola. Intel's retentiveness of 386 led to lawsuits and bitterness. At the end of the cycle AMD486 was perhaps superior to i486. Simply seizing control of the mpu market took everything Intel had.
