Intel did a great job coming up with great ideas before everyone else, then killing them off once someone decided they weren't going to immediately make 60% gross margins. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly the company managed to throw away good ideas because it could only make 40% gross margin, or was going to take another few years to develop a market.
You could argue Microsoft had the same disease. Ultimately, it's not as terminal because turning around a software-sized cruise ship is alot easier than turning around a hardware one.
Google can be refocused in a 4 years. Intel, at minimum, seems to need a decade.
Microsoft has a worse case of the same problem but greater monopoly force. Entirely dependent on the captive markets but rapidly snatching up everything they can to enforce it on other markets.
That said Google could be doing worse. They at least have something around phones and AI. They're trying to attack some new markets. Google was structured so shareholders have no power but share price is still something that is going to drive decisions and hasn't been that amazing recently.
Intel has actually had many quarters of declining revenue, Google has been far more consistent in the last 15 years. Intel has had over 20 quarters where revenue declined since 2010 and they are spread out across 2010-2024, while Google only lost revenue in two quarters.
I would argue that Intel's poor performance is quite detached from Google's consistently exceptional performance. Heck, they aren't even in the same business (primarily hardware vs. primarily media (advertising) and software).
Google is:
- A member of the smartphone app store duopoly
- A member of the cloud compute big 3
- Nearly a pure monopoly in Internet search in Western countries
- Has a higher office productivity software marketshare than Microsoft Office
- Internet cable TV provider with the highest subscriber count
I'd like to understand how it "hasn't been that amazing recently."
YTD S&P 500 has a 26.9% return and GOOG has 25.7%.
Intel has been around since 1968 and Google since 1998. As you say they're also in a different business. But Intel has executed pretty well up to maybe 2007 so over about 50 years. vs. Google's 26 years of existence.
Most of your bullet points aren't anything new, this is Google riding on work that's been done a while back. The question is what will be the new bullet points and whether it will be able to stave competition eating into its existing bullet points. The pressure to get the stock price higher is going to take its toll as the bean counters try to artificially inflate it.
I’m not sure what less than one percent difference from the S&P 500 is supposed to prove good or bad. The S&P 500 is heavily weighted toward Alphabet, it literally is a big part of the S&P 500 itself.
And, you know, Exxon Mobil hasn’t really made a new product in quite some time but they’re doing just fine.
Still, I’d say that Google has had plenty of new products and bets that it has been making, along with great recent performance in many ways.
They’re finally hitting their stride with consumer hardware, with the FitBit acquisition clearly boosting their wearables business and selling a lot more pixel watches than any previous smartwatch effort.
Similarly, Pixel phones themselves have jumped from around 4% marketshare to 8-12% marketshare in the US just this year. Success in that arena is very new to Google, so I would call that a long term investment that is paying off.
Google is investing in custom Tensor processors which is also a recent product launch for them, starting in 2020.
Stadia was a new product that obviously failed in the end but did represent a decent technical achievement and major bet on a new product.
YouTube TV isn’t that old, either, it launched 2017, and being the top subscribed digital cable product is a big achievement.
The elephant in the room for newest major product launch is Bard AI and Gemini. It’s fair to say AI is less than proven and that these may be copycat products, but it’s also true that it’s going to be an area where your big competitors are basically Microsoft, Apple, and Google with little room for anyone else.
And let’s not forget that large companies can boost their value proposition and mitigate competitive threats through acquisitions. Even IBM’s lost decade was overcome, and a lot of it was through acquisitions and business unit spinoffs and closures that helped modernize their offerings (companies like Red Hat and Hashicorp).
So what you're telling me is that I should be listening to you, a random person on the Internet, and expect that one of the most valuable companies in the world with decades of consistent revenue growth, a monopoly in internet search, duopoly in smartphone operating systems/app stores, one of the big 3 social media companies, one of the big 3 cloud compute companies, one of the big 3 AI companies, and the owner of the digital cable TV provider with the highest subscriber count is just going to magically not be successful in the future?
You might as well be telling me that you think that Saudi Aramco is going to go under because they need to fix their "culture."
Culture is not important for their revenue, most of the company is not. The ads business is their cash cow which finances the rest of the company. They can have horrible culture and mismanagement everywhere and revenue will still grow - if they don‘t fuck up their teams working on ads.
Intel has a habit of coming up with great ideas, then deciding that they aren't immediately successful or immediately 60+% gross margins, so it clearly isn't worth following up. Intel's R&D department is a grave yard of great products murdered at the alter of Gross Margin.
Larrabee is one such product. It wasn't immediately great, and didn't immediately promise great returns, and didn't quite have a market yet, so it was killed. I can't imagine where Intel would be in the AI world if they had the foresight to stick with Larrabee.
Yep. Intel has no patience. They have high margin businesses throwing off lots of cash, so the finance-driven culture says “why waste money on risky new things that can’t possibly equal that level of profitability in the short term?”
Somehow they forgot that all of their highly profitably businesses were risky bets at one time.
Right. Google has the same problem. Any time they create a new product, it’s a coin flip on whether or not it’ll still be around in a year or two. I’ve steered multiple companies away from Google’s offerings because I just don’t think you should trust that any of their newer products will still be around in 5-10 years.
Good on them for sticking with their promises for firebase. But it’s a pity about stadia. Don’t bet your business on a flip of the Google coin.
I was inside since Otellini (left last year). Otellini at least 'stayed the course' reasonably well. I never felt like the company was going to GROW, but at least not die.
BK is who did his best to sink the company, multiple mis-guided layoffs, bad top level hirings, and stupid direction changes every time he read a new news article. Don't even mention his absurd AMA on reddit where he couldn't stop using the ellipse and laughing like a 14 year old girl.
Bob Swan wasn't the guy who could right the ship. He was another Otellini type guy, someone you bring in to not mess stuff up. Pat was a great pickup for Intel, and his return was my first time hoping that Intel could actually survive and grow.
Unfortunately, he came by too late. Foundry STILL hadn't really made progress, and the rot in the rest of the company had set in too far. The brain drain from BK was still being felt everywhere.
Frankly, I still feel like Pat was the right guy, 10 years too late. He joined to right the ship, but by the time he came aboard, the ship had already hit the iceberg, and the bow was 30 feet in the air. And now he's being blamed for the ship sinking.
This is a great answer. Pat is not a wartime CEO. He could have been fantastic for Intel if the company was somewhat healthy and the competition was not so fierce.
The clang driver is particularly bad at this. There is a frequent 'just add one more thing here!' in every section of the driver. Additionally, it is large, somewhat complex, and not very exciting, so those refactors/simplifications don't happen nearly as often as other parts of the clang code base.
The tablegen/macro-gen stuff DID get added at one point fortunately, but before that it was pretty rough as well.
Eh? Intel stock is basically flat in that time. It was ~28 around this time in 2007 (IIRC, was my hire date), and its now 32.
Intel stock is a lot of things, but 'up 80%' hasn't been something true since the early 2000s.
ETA: That was 16 years ago I was thinking of, I forgot about the nasty dip in 2008. I misremembered, it was ~26 when I was hired, dipped to 18 the next year, and slowly climbed a while and has been around that $30/share number for ages.
That is a 'warning as default error', so for at least Clang16, it is still disable-able. The Clang code owner is on a bit of a well-deserved war-path against these, so they are likely to be completely illegal in the next version or two.
My parents had me do a driving school that specializes in inclement weather training. A few years ago, I did one at ProDrive at Portland International Raceway, and they have a car on a sled that reduces traction that is REALLY good for teaching kids this.
