Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini Dies At 66 (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Paul Otellini, Intel's previous CEO, died in his sleep on Monday, the company announced this morning. He was 66. Otellini served as Intel's fifth chief executive from 2005 through 2013, and leaves behind a legacy of the company's dominance in x86 processors. Notably, he also worked with Apple as it moved away from PowerPC chips and adopted Intel's wares. After retiring in 2013, Otellini revealed one major regret during his tenure: not working hard enough to get Intel's chips in the iPhone. Consequently, Intel mostly missed on the smartphone revolution.

Otellini joined Intel in 1974 and served various roles throughout his career, including chief operating officer from 2003 to 2005. He would go on to spend almost 40 years at the company. He was an intriguing choice as CEO, since he was the company's first non-engineer to hold that role.

Comments

Re:How did he die?

[TroII]

Unexpected jump to opcode 0F 04.

Damn.

[Penguinisto]

No shit... that blows.

Dude was CEO when I worked there. He was a pretty decent guy (at least to the employees. To AMD, not so much.) I will say that I didn't like the idea of having R&D projects competing not only for resources, but manpower. If your project died (like Digital Home Group, which I was in), you had to go into the 'pool' until you could find another project to work for (and if you didn't by the third month, you were unemployed.) There were some groups that were guaranteed to live forever (Server Group, anyone?), but most had to fight like hell to remain relevant, remain visible to management, and survive. While I understand how it creates better products (in a way) and culls dead-end ones, it led to more than a bit of instability among the R&D half of the company...

Re:Damn.

[Penguinisto]

It's not as common to have groups (or divisions, or whatever) openly (and with executive blessing) competing directly against each other, poaching workers from each other, etc. I mean yeah, many companies have something similar, but Intel took it to amazingly high levels of political/social back-stabbery. If your group's leadership wasn't a pack of wolves and/or your product wasn't a stock-busting smash hit, your group didn't last too awful long.

Re:Damn.

[networkBoy]

^^THIS

I was with a chipset firmware team that was duplicated in the states and in Israel. Unfortunately the culture clash and competition clash led to some very abusive practices. I stood up against management about this, and was railroaded out the door with my chin up high, and like Milton's red stapler I took my lab chair with me! (Makes a kick-ass guitar stool; had direct mgr blessing and HR droid's approval).

Later the same year my entire former team was sent into the redeployment pool and all operations moved to the JER site.
After 17 years I met my end there, never to be employed by them again.
Barret was a vastly better CEO than Otellini, but BK makes both of the other two look like saints.

Re:Damn.

[zifn4b]

I was with a chipset firmware team that was duplicated in the states and in Israel. Unfortunately the culture clash and competition clash led to some very abusive practices. I stood up against management about this, and was railroaded out the door with my chin up high, and like Milton's red stapler I took my lab chair with me!

I've seen this too many times. Companies seem to be reading out of the same textbooks. What they seem to be doing is using psychology and sociology to essentially create a milder form of negative social conformity similar to what many malevolent rulers have employed in history. It's hard to describe. Basically, you establish some cultural principles but you spin them to sound good when in reality they are very bad. Like for example "we don't like slackers" means "if you work less than 80 hours a week, you're a slacker". You don't want to be shamed as being a slacker do you? Or we like "positive, enthusiastic people" really means "just say yes to management about any decisions it makes and give them much praise for their infinite wisdom and that they were benevolent enough to allow you to bask in this." You don't want to not be positive and enthusiastic do you? Nobody likes people like that. If you challenge any of these principles you get semantically tagged as being "a problem" or "negative" or any number of errors of fundamental attribution that any rational and sane person could plainly see. Once this happens the sociopathic, passive aggressive games start and it never ends well.

It really is a milder form of Philip Zimbardo's Lucifer effect. These executive managers are creating the most psychologically dysfunctional environments by doing this and they are not completely harmless. You might not be getting put on a firing line or tortured physically, but these types of tactics are by definition, psychological abuse. The same psychological abuse you would find in a dysfunctional family of sociopaths. You can read quite clear descriptions of this stuff in any psychology textbook.

Ultimately, the only thing compelling about a dysfunctional and psychologically abusive work environment is the pay and people will only want the pay if there is "no better option" common during The Great Recession. That is used as leverage. Once the supply of workers goes down and need for labor goes up, those companies are forced to change or they can go down in a blaze of glory.

Re:He will be missed.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best CEO since I have been with the company. He deserved so much more time to enjoy his retirement...

Less of a fan since I was there and saw first hand how he screwed up the wireless business with a string of inept decisions and poor management appointments. The view from the CPU side may have been different.

Re:He will be missed.

[zaft]

Agreed. I always liked him, though not pushing into mobile was a grievous mistake. Still, he was the CEO for most of my time at Intel (he left about a year before I did) and it looked like things were going to get nastier under BK (and indeed they have).

Re:Regret not getting on iPhone???

[networkBoy]

Until he liquidated it to Marvell, Intel had StrongARM; and internally had the RISC i960 that both could have done amazingly in this space, both were (stupidly IMnsHO) liquidated to make room for Atom/TinyIA/Quark, all of which have some level of the x86 baggage (from most to least) and thus the power consumption overhead.

i960 *could* have been re-tooled into an ultra low power core and simply add on the peripherals to make it into a SoC, or StrongARM could have been remodeled into a QC competitor.

Re:He will be missed.

[cheesybagel]

Intel typically has a lot of issues entering new chip markets. Just look at all the issues they have with getting a high performance GPU designed. They been at it almost as long as NVIDIA. Remember the i740?

Re:Regret not getting on iPhone???

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel had an ARM chip division for Phone CPUs called XScale from 2002 to 2006 when they sold it to Marvell to focus on the more profitable x86 series.

His "greatest regret" comment is pure BS. He made the wrong decision to get out of phone CPUs