Intel

Intel is a dominant company in computing. It has depth, experience, and silicon design and development skills to maintain that for years.

Intel has lots of resources. If it's hardware-related and Intel wants in, it's very difficult to prevent it.

x86: 30 years of software investment is tough to walk away from, especially if the performance/price is competitive.

Intel's leaders generally believe the internal propaganda too much and buy into the hype that their leaders are visionary and outstanding.

Internal communication tends to be too often propaganda, spin, or just feel-good.

Way too much time is spent telling folks we need to do things differently, without clear examples from the person speaking on what they've done.

1. Lead by example.
2. Talk less, do more (see #1).
3. Get realistic (see #1 and #2).

Almost everyone understands you need to have aggressive schedules to hit a reasonable one, but pushing for the same old frequency/power push, more features, in less time, with a flat headcount, and while enabling more reuse doesn't work out. You can't legislate a 30% or 50% productivity improvement, especially on projects that are supposed to lay the groundwork for future productivity improvements.

"The employees are the experts" works if there's a framework to make trade-offs in. There's no framework, so it's just do more, faster.