lumireleon
ANSWER TO INTEL WOES: (1) Replace the top management (2) End the Blue versus Green badge employee politics, its bad for the creative engineers.
Essentially Hexus said it all… “Companies are naturally inclined to try and show their products in the best light but go too far and you will lose trust and burn through years of goodwill very quickly.”
Absolutely. Intel's division between the two tiers is killing them. Good engineers who are working on the actual front line of R&D aren't allowed to (or if they are allowed, aren't rewarded) make suggestions on improvements. They are also resentful as they're doing the grunt work without any corporate rewards (like full use of the R&R facilities) or job security. They are used to do a specific job, abused and dumped. I'd be resentful and I'd keep my good ideas to myself to show off at an interview for a company that'll treat me right.
I think they are making inroads into the top management as they did get rid of one of the troublecausers.
A business like Intel thrives on propagation of good ideas. It has learnt that it doesn't need to advance, as it wasn't being competed with, so it completely choked off the ideas market within the company. Now, AMD and (I hate to say it) Apple are showing that even the largest companies aren't too big to fail.
You're supposed to be selling innovation, whereas Intel was selling chips. Haswell only became unusable for me because of the side channel vulnerability mitigations. I only had to upgrade in several years due to Intel's screw ups and the only place to get properly better performance was their competitor.
I hope Intel survives this as the last thing we need is AMD (or APPLE!!) being all tyrannical in its place.
As for the second point, I feel marketing should just resist showing comparisons to competitor products. We never trust them anyway. Compare yourself to where you were yesterday and you should always show progress. Let the reviewers compare you to the competition. Internally, of course they should be buying and analysing competitor products. But the marketing should be just clean of it all so we can't question anything.
A salesman who always ridicules the competition is one not to be trusted, as it means their own product doesn't have enough selling points and they have to stomp on others. A salesman who always sticks to comparison to their older generation products feels more trustworthy, as they are pointing out flaws and improvements against their own products. Then, when that second salesman does mention something about the competition and where they have gone wrong, boy do you remember it… because they felt so strongly that they had to tell you.