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When you’ve got a great big instruction set, an architecture designed long before power consumption was an issue, a process technology devised to deliver blazing speed and nothing else and a reputation for bullying your customers, it’s unlikely that changing the manager is going to make a lot of difference to your efforts to enter the mobile market.
So Anand Chandrasekher’s departure from Intel this week is unlikely to have an iota of effect on Intel’s mobility plans – which look sick some 15 years after Intel first said they wanted to become the primary supplier of building blocks to the telecoms industry.
Having seen how Intel sucked such a vast proportion of the profits from the computer industry, the telecoms industry just doesn’t want Intel. Do you want your silicon provider to take most of the profit of your industry?
No, is the right answer.
As soon as Intel buys Apple’s baseband supplier, Apple changes its baseband supplier.
Despite getting an ARM architecture licence, despite buying into every mobile OS, despite Atom, despite spending billions on mobile acquisitions, Intel’s mobile aspirations droop like a wind-sock in a flat calm.
Intel just doesn’t seem to get the message – the mobile industry doesn’t want you.
TOMORROW MORNING: Top Ten Fabless Companies.
I’m not sure that any malice remains within CE or Teleco / Wintel negotiations. Sure there was determination to keep them out 15 years ago, but that’s gone. Today the reaction is more a sense of pity for a once great athlete. You watch them drag out second rate overpriced “vaporware solutions” addressing markets where you are already shipping production product, it’s truly sad! A little like a punch drunk boxing legend entering the ring against a younger fighter, they take a vicious beating, just so the hangers-on can create a payday event. It’s SAD!
Well Yes Edward, to my mind it’s the ‘you only get one chance to screw the industry’ syndrome. Having seen how Intel has been screwing the PC industry for 25 years, the telecoms industry has said No to Intel’s products because they fear that if they say Yes, they’ll end up getting screwed just like the PC industry. Intel were pretty candid about their intentions towards the telecoms industry when they first tried to penetrate it 15 years ago. Intel were saying at that time that the telecoms industry was ‘ripe for siliconisation’ i.e. that the silicon suppliers should control and dominate the telecoms infrastructure manufactuing industry just as Intel’s silicon dominated and controlled the PC industry. The telecoms infrastructure guys would have been idiots, in the circumstances, to have let Intel in.
There are two primary issues with the recent market failures at Intel. The first has been accurately articulated in this article. The second is regarding Intel’s ecosystem failure. Intel built their PC ecosystem nearly thirty years ago and have been successfully managing it to this day. However, Intel have lost the ability, or perhaps lost the willingness, to build an ecosystem when they try and enter new markets such as mobility. This is a primary reason they are failing at mobility as well as CE. Intel believes they can simply enter a market and the ecosystem will fall in line because…. well because they are Intel. At CES I messed around with set top boxes based on Intel Atom processors and was amazed at the performance navigating menus, running applications, changing channels, etc. But Intel wasn’t able to sell their technology to the CE manufactures.
Intel has acted like a mafia don in the PC market for all of these decades, right alongside Microsoft. Is it any wonder that neither of these two have a snowball’s chance in hell to enter the mobile market? Microsoft thinks that supporting ARM processors is going to help it. While Intel thinks that supporting Android OS is going to help it. Each one thinks the other dance partner is to blame and they can do better by changing dance partners. The fact of the matter is that nobody wants to touch either of these companies with a ten-foot pole. Microsoft+ARM hasn’t got a chance, and neither has Intel+Android.
Well, Hector. it’s kinder than the perspective of the Chairman of the US FTC, Jon Leibowitz who said, last August: “We believe Intel stepped well over the line of aggressive competition on the merits, and engaged in unfair, deceptive and anti-competitive conduct. The sum total of all this anti-competitive conduct unfairly prevented companies from competing, bolstered Intel’s monopoly, and harmed consumers by stunting innovation, diminishing quality, and keeping prices higher than they would otherwise be.”Wow indeed.
Wow. That’s a pretty narrow & harse perspective of Intel.