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Paul Otellini: Intel Lost the iPhone Battle, But It Could Win the Mobile War
kenekaplan writes "In an interview with The Atlantic before stepping down as CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini reflects on his decision not to make a chip for the then yet released iPhone. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'"
Your gut then took up arms and told your brain to go on vacation.
I usually don't keep up on things like this, so it was nice to see an article that really s
Long signatures suck.
chip for the then yet released iPhone
I have heard the term then yet unreleased but what does then yet released mean? Is this something like flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Way to far up Otellini ass. Was there some bad PR that prompted to him to write this turd encrusted, brown nosing article....
of dollars are buried under a giant W??? Is that what the editor was trying to say?
Yeah, we've all heard guys tell stories like this. It takes me about 20 seconds before I mentally paint an "L" on their forehead.
The day Steve Jobs stood in front of a room and introduced the Iphone EVERYONE knew this was a game changer. "Today we're going to introduce a new iPod, a phone, and world class web device" As he repeated that line the graphics on the screen merged and the room realized the leaks about three new products were instead one new device. It was a hell of a mis-direction. It wasn't "the mother of all demos" but it was a close second.
Intel knew this was on the way and didn't think it was lightning in a bottle? Their shareholders should be furious.
My gut tells me not to eat tacos with honey Diablo habenero sauce anymore. I don't listen either.
Silence is a state of mime.
So, he made a perfectly rational decision based upon the data he had available. It turned out in the long run that he would have been better off if he had acted otherwise, so looking back on it he says it would be better to reject rational decision making. I find this unconvincing. In my experience, people have a fantastic way of revising their own personal histories and 'the gut' is a great tool to do so. If I made the best choice I could, given the information I had, and it turned out incorrect I can always look back on things and say that my gut told me otherwise. By this means the chief protagonist of my personal history will always be correct, always know the right thing to do, even when it turned out to be wrong.
Would the iPhone still be a success with an Intel processor, given the power consumption of their chips at the time.
Is that some new Windows phone?
foundry is not a high margin business. apple seems to be making all the money on the iphone. how much money would intel have made selling $20 chips?
you could argue they could have controlled the entire mobile chip market by now, but that is a stretch
While I really don't care for gut feelings of some bigwig, it's pretty obvious that it would be stupid for Intel to try to make CPU for iPhone -- Intel is a lot of things but it's not a manufacturer of CPUs that are optimized for power efficiency to the extent of having low performance, something that Apple wanted for the original iPhone. Intel may decide to build a non-x86 line of CPUs for some future mobile applications, but they have no such product now, and they had no chance to complete the development cyclle for it then. So well, duh.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
iPhone - Not Intel Inside
Android - Not Intel Inside
Windows Phone - Not Intel Inside
Blackberry - Not Intel Inside
Tablets - Not Intel Inside
Game Consoles - Not Intel Inside
TV - Not Intel Inside
Microwave - Not Intel Inside
Lagging Ultrabook sales - Intel Inside
Lagging Desktop sales - Intel Inside
Did someone redefine the world Win?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
For Intel to "win" the "mobile war" as the headline suggests, Intel would have to get the mobile device market to adopt proprietary Intel parts that only Intel can sell. Otherwise, Intel is just another vendor, and the mobile device makers can buy from Intel or not at their whim; Intel just being one of a group of commodity providers is not what Intel considers a "win".
I've said it before: Apple will never lock themselves in with Intel.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
So, he made a perfectly rational decision based upon the data he had available. It turned out in the long run that he may have been better off if he had acted otherwise
FTFY
What this story tells me is that while your gut instinct may or may not be offering you the best path forward, you owe it to yourself as a business leader to figure out why your gut contradicts the data. If all you do is make logical decisions based on easily available data, then you can probably be replaced by a simple algorithm that can make more reliable decisions than you anyway.
In this case, Otellini had data in front of him, but his gut instinct contradicted the data-driven path forward. He ignored it and moved on, convinced that it was safer (?) to be on the side of the data. But the data led him astray. Why?
Because he had partial data, data that was probably focused on previous mobile computing entries and little on Apple's recent design successes, superior user experiences and marketing capabilities. If he'd realized his gut was really signalling that they needed more and different kinds of data, I suspect Intel would have gone down a different path.
Remember, Intel was THE LEADER in cutting-edge ARM chips until they sold the ARM division to Marvell in June 2006. They even introduced high-end feature like Mobile MMX and SpeedStep, and pushed clock speeds higher than any of their competitors.
That's absolutely in the time-frame of iPhone development, plus a year into Paul's tenure. The fact that they sold the ARM division and decided to start back at square one with Atom (not exactly a power miser in the first revision) shows that they had no intention of going "high volume, low price" like Steve Jobs was asking.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
When anyone uses an Intel x86 CPU, they cannot avoid paying the 'Intel Tax'.
-massive waste of die space for hardware blocks that translate the putrid x86/x64 instruction set into the internal RISC ISA used by Intel (and AMD, although a different RISC ISA).
-massive waste of energy driving this translation block
-massive intellectual property costs for implementing this block
-massive code inefficiency cost in having to program to the x86/x64 ISA, rather than the underlying true architecture of an Intel CPU
These FOUR sides of the Intel Tax cannot, by definition, be avoided when using an Intel CPU. On the other hand, going ARM means avoiding each of these four costs, massively (emphasis by repetition deliberately used) reducing the potential base (lowest) cost of the CPU.
It gets worse. Intel maintains its technology advantage over its only x86 competitor (that matters), AMD, by outspending AMD thousands-to-one on R&D. Even so, AMD enjoys a technology lead over Intel in most areas- such is Intel's gross incompetence.
Intel needs a massive profit per chip sold to survive. Intel cannot operate on the same margins as the rest of the industry. Intel can, with criminal intent and criminal activity, illegally bribe third parties to use some of its products in order to attempt to subvert key emerging markets. Put simply, Intel will pay people to use certain classes of new Intel parts, which means these chips actually have a NEGATIVE COST to the companies using them.
It doesn't matter. Intel is done. The company should have merged with Nvidia years ago, but refused to do so since the price (rightfully) demanded was to have the Nvidia managers take control of the combined enterprise. Now it is far too late. Intel has NOTHING for the mobile markets. Intel has NOTHING for the 3D graphics sensitive markets. Intel has NOTHING for the future, much lower priced PC markets.
All Intel has is a 'fast' mains powered core that is somewhat more power efficient than AMD. This core is massively expensive to make, and requires a massive amount of die space. It is highly profitable for Intel ONLY while Intel can demand 50 dollars per CPU core (remember, we are talking about Intel's good cores, not the crap it puts into Atoms or those 'low' priced desktop pentium parts). The problem is that the days of single-threaded power-apps is over.
What Intel will have for the foreseeable future is a pile of cash to pays sites like this to shill for their products. Tech sites can currently write their own cheques when explaining to Intel PR bods just how much that next favourable article is going to cost Intel, and Intel will happily pay up. You are literally talking about Intel paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for positive press on the bigger sites. Intel has no useful technology, so what else can it do apart from trying to talk a better game?
And for the more clueless amongst you that still believes the Intel propaganda, know that the coming Haswell part has already been benchmarked and it is SLOWER that the previous Ivybridge design on existing x86 code. With carefully chosen benchmarks it can be spun as being maybe 3% faster than Ivybridge when NOT using the GPU. Another generation of parts from Intel that do NOT improve the one market Intel is supposed to dominate- the high-end PC desktop. Intel isn't any longer competent in the one area it is supposed to have an unassailable lead.
Desktops are where Intel belong, but how would it play out if 90% of desktop users finally realized AMD is best bang for their buck? Intel must lower their prices, or they may eventually be left with nothing but the high-end desktop segment for the remaining 10% desktop users who require the fastest stuff.