
Intel CEO Paul Otellini to Retire in May - quadrahelix
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/11/19/intel-ceo-paul-otellini-to-retire-in-may?cid=rss-90004-c1-278408
======
geebee
I do remember feeling a little disappointed when Paul Otellini was announced
as CEO. Paul's an impressive guy, and a local boy, but he is an econ
major/MBA, and I always find it a little depressing to learn that a venerable
tech company will now be led by someone without a strong engineering or
science background.

Actually, I think "first non-technical CEO" probably deserves a notch on a
technology company's time line. It doesn't mean that the company won't
succeed, but it is a sign that it has become a different type of company (this
may be more a reflection of this change than a cause).

But unlike some other high profile flame-outs, it sounds like Otellini was a
success at the helm.

~~~
wtvanhest
The first non-tech CEO is usually a strong sign that a company has grown from
a startup with a single product focus to a long-term viable business with a
diversified product portfolio. (Think GE, AT&T, Boeing etc.)

For people in the HN community, this is mostly horrific because it represents
everything they avoid. However, for almost everyone else out there that is
working for the purpose of simply providing for their families, the stability
and strength of a diversified company is typically a major positive.

The thing that is always missing from the HN discussions about how bad MBAs
are for a company etc. is that at the extremes of business, business becomes
highly technical and requires someone who is technically proficient at
business.

Knowing how to create the next high end transistor technology which maintains
Moore's law is amazing, but that person is highly unlikely to keep a company
of Intel's size successful.

~~~
geebee
_that person is highly unlikely to keep a company of Intel's size successful._

Perhaps so... particularly in the moment. To me, it's more a question of
whether that CEO is a person who once would have known how to create the next
high end transistor (or whatever technology innovation is central to the
business) and is still able to have that conversation as an
engineer/scientist.

For instance, I doubt Andy Grove, at the end of his tenure, would have been
able to do that kind of tech work in the moment, but he had a PhD in
engineering and had a very deep knowledge of the technology as well as the
business. He did make some very typical-of-engineers mistakes when intel
decided to raise its consumer profile. And I'm not trying to bring up a debate
around Andy Grove's management style (though of course, people are free to
comment what they like). But it's hard to say he didn't keep the company
successful, even at a very large scale.

Otellini was a successful CEO, but (I actually don't know this for sure) did
he _ever_ have the ability to do the core tech work behind intel's product?

I suppose that in this era of high profile non-tech CEO flameouts (HP, Yahoo),
Otellini may actually be a counter-example that a non-technical CEO can still
be quite successful.

~~~
tsotha
>For instance, I doubt Andy Grove, at the end of his tenure, would have been
able to do that kind of tech work in the moment, but he had a PhD in
engineering and had a very deep knowledge of the technology as well as the
business. He did make some very typical-of-engineers mistakes when intel
decided to raise its consumer profile.

Grove is a great example of a successful technical CEO. I would never say
Otellini was a failure, but Intel flourished under Grove in a way that it
didn't under Otellini.

~~~
geebee
Yes, I agree, to say Grove "kept the company successful" (referring to once it
became a huge company), is to understate how much it flourished.

------
bryanlarsen
What a legacy -- he retires the same day that Intel wins. AMD just ceded the
high margin CPU business to concentrate on the volume CPU business.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804602>

Otellini's successor will be playing a different game, fighting ARM rather
than AMD.

~~~
khuey
Which is the game Intel should have been playing for the last N years.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Reports are that the Razr i based on an Intel processor is competitive --
similar performance & power usage to an S4 with twice the number of cores. The
pre-game warmup is complete. Now the game starts.

~~~
ajross
Right, they're playing the game and have competetive parts. What the ARM-is-
the-future people fail to recognize is that the x86 world isn't remotely dead.
Relative to consumer SoCs, Intel makes _shockingly high_ margins on its
desktop and server silicon. It simply doesn't make sense for them to be making
high volume embedded chips unless they have excess fab capacity (which they
don't).

The Medfield chips are performance-competetive with existing parts, though
they aren't stand-outs. But even if, say, they had a mythical chip that would
get lets-just-say-for-argument 2x the performance of Tegra 3 or A6 at 50% of
the power draw, _they would still not be manufacturing it in volume_ , for the
simple reason that Ivy Bridge cores make a whole lot more money for them than
a Tegra-killer would.

So from an investor's perspective, Intel is doing exactly the right thing.
Stay in the game, don't cede the market. Make sure your products are
competetive, but don't walk away from easy cash either.

Long term, their success will be driven by the value of their SoC products as
the desktop world dissolves. But current market penetration isn't a good
indicator of what the likelihood of that value will be.

~~~
temac
> It simply doesn't make sense for them to be making high volume embedded
> chips unless they have excess fab capacity (which they don't).

Well they desperately want to do it anyway. Anyway by your very reasoning,
they won't do high volume chips (you added embedded but it does not matter,
you just can't reach the same volume as embedded chips with such higher
prices). Whether they not reach that for a reason or another does not matter
much; but the consequences of that fail could be hard. The desktop and server
world is not going away, the x86 world also is here to stay, but there is no
hard limit to the changes of market repartition that can happen even there.
IBM is still very powerful with their mainframes, and Intel could follow that
path for (a part of) desktops and servers, but the more they allow the ARM
world to develop, the more their share is at risk on their own land in the
long term.

The problem is that SoC offering not only matters now, but it even has
mattered for several years, and Intel had no offering, sill has no serious
one, and is probably not even going to have no serious one for several other
years. For a company with such resources, this is crazy. And when you take a
look at the press communicate to try to understand what they think that
matter, you do not expect big changes: "operations and the cost structure" i
don't know enough to judge so i give it the benefit of the doubt,
"breakthrough innovations" are real important stuff, so good point here; but:
\- "Reinvented the PC with Ultrabook™ devices" <\- is this a joke??? \-
"Greatly expanded business partnerships and made strategic acquisitions that
expanded Intel’s presence in security, software and mobile communications" <\-
ok they are talking about Intel's McAfee and other stuffs that makes no sense
here \- "Delivered the first smartphones and tablets for sale with Intel
inside" <\- okkkkk, so? huge fail here, and they do not even try to pretend
they matter in this field, just that they exist, because they know they won't
be forgiven if they don't. That's what we are talking about. \- "Grew the vast
network of cloud-based computing built on Intel products" <\- not driven by
them. They could as well have talked about the internet and we servers, but
the fashion word of the day is cloud, so they talked about that.

Intel, desktops and servers, are here to stay, we agree on that. But their
market share is at risk, because these markets are not isolated island. Intel
won't be able to increase their prices too much, so if their market decrease
too much, do the maths.

------
Aardwolf
So according to Moore's law, he should have seen things get 106528681 times
more transistors at Intel!

~~~
monopede
Moore's law: Transistor count doubles every 18 months. Assuming 40 years at
the company (it's a bit less) that's: 2^(40/1.5) = 67,108,864

The 62 Core Xeon Phi has 5 billion transistors. Divided by that number is:
149. That's a bit low. The Intel 8080 that came out in 1974 (when he joined
the company) had 4,500 transistors. Looks like Moore's law has been slowing
down a bit in recent years. Probably due to the focus on reduced energy usage.

EDIT: It works out if you replace "18 months" by "24 months". Revised value:
2^(38/2) = 524288. Impressive still.

~~~
Aardwolf
2^(40/1.5) is 106528681, just like I posted...

Which calculator are you using? Does it use a Pentium CPU with the famous
division bug perhaps? :)

~~~
monopede
I was using the "bc" command line calculator. Turns out it's rounding the
exponent. The revised number is correct, though.

~~~
Aardwolf
Note to self: never use the bc command line calculator.

------
ISL
Bummed to see that the financial achievements were noted before the technical
ones (and that the true technical achievements were relegated to a single
bullet point).

This is hard to do at scale: "* Achieved breakthrough innovations, including
High-K/Metal gate and now 3-D Tri-gate transistors; and dramatic improvement
in energy efficiency of Intel processors"

------
ksec
Notable absent from that list is he fired Pat Gelsinger.

Please just bring him back as CEO.

------
lewisflude
That's a very long time to work for one company! Wish him the best.

------
cjdrake
I work for Intel, and I congratulate Paul on his tenure.

On the whole, I would say most of my engineer colleagues approve of Paul's
leadership, MBA or otherwise :).

It will be interesting to see if Intel's next CEO decides to take any exciting
new turns. Particularly with respect to the PC market, we live in interesting
times.

------
andyjohnson0
Nit pick: The article says he's been at Intel for "nearly 40 years". According
to Wikipedia he joined the company in 1974 [1]. Still a long time though.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini#Employment_at_Int...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini#Employment_at_Intel)

~~~
lanstein
Is 38 not nearly 40?

~~~
arrrg
Huh, when someone says nearly forty years (in connection with human lifetimes)
I assume the margin of error is at most a year. Human lives are too short and
years too long.

~~~
komlon
'You Know What They Say About Assumptions, it makes an ass outa u and me'

tldr; you're an ass.

------
mtgx
A good time for him to leave before the downwards trend of Intel becomes more
obvious, and people start blaming it on him. I hope he leaves the board of
Google, too, because I don't like how he has influenced some of Google's
decisions in the past few years, to use Intel chips instead of ARM in their
new devices, and every single one of them turned out to be the wrong decision.

~~~
andyjohnson0
Which "new devices" are you referring to? As far as I know the Nexus One and
Nexus 4 use Qualcomm CPUs, and the Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, and Nexus
10 all use ARM CPUs.

Edit: Thanks to those who pointed out that I'd forgotten the Chromebooks and
Google TV. Given the limited extent to which Google have marketed these
devices, I'm not sure whether they can be said to have failed yet. And even if
they have failed, it is not clear that this was due to using Intel components.

~~~
bryanlarsen
But those were successful devices. He's talking about Google devices that
failed, in part because they used Intel CPU's. Devices like the original
Google TV.

~~~
4ad
How do you know it failed _because_ of Intel CPUs?

