Intel needs a major shakeup, it has been brewing for a long time, but coffers were too full. Cushion is gone now, urgency is now understood by everyone; now it takes a visionary and some successful execution, for once.
If you say corruption is the difference, maybe - but I wouldn't be so pessimistic... yet.
https://docseuss.medium.com/the-biggest-threat-facing-your-t...
"Doc Burford contends that the true danger facing teams today isn’t competition, disruption, or lack of capital—it’s leadership devoid of expertise, decision-making dominated by superficial metrics, and a culture that values appearances more than actual value creation. Sustainable success comes from building things people want, not engineering facades to appease investors or the market. Relying solely on executive titles or data without understanding the craft or customer rapidly leads to collapse."
Have to agree and think this encapsulates alot of what we have been living through in the US over last few decades.
The Bungie grenade example was funny because I've seen this exact same ignorant data fuckery. Blizzard does this with World of Warcraft now because they're tuning talents that classes have based on how much they're used, which ignores how often people just copy builds and how some abilities are just inherently fun (as the grenades apparently were). The net result is they just keep nerfing anything people like.
When he was talking about Valve and Steam and EA and sports exclusivity, he may as well have just said "enclosures" (in the capitalist) sense because that's exactly what he means.
Every modern corporation is just looking for a formula that they can repeat ad nauseum. He talks about this with media properties and the Marvel and Star Wars slop (my word, not his) that we get as a result. This is fundamentally incompatible with creative projects, be it movies or games.
One of the most destructive ideas to come out of the 20th century is this idea that a good business leader can manage anything. So we get a lot of "leaders" who end up running things they know nothing about and in large companies, "leaders" get shuffled around every 6-12 months on purpose, to avoid them ever failing because they're never anywhere long enough to see the consequences of their actions.
You see that with the VP shuffle at any large tech company.
I also appreciate that he was anti-NFTs as I was for the exact same reasons: it doesn't actually solve any problems or give consumers anything they actually want.
But indeed I feel like at some level there's been a pendulum swing from, let's say "stories" to "data" - indeed he touches on sabermetrics/McNamara. I like how he torches this: data is important but it's not enough (the map is not the territory) -- I started wondering about this a lot for example with Windows. "Oh, we removed this feature because telemetry showed it wasn't used." Well, why? Because it wasn't useful? Because it wasn't discoverable? Because it wasn't intuitive?
And that assumes the numbers are even any good: I remember from one of Sinofsky's Windows engineering blog posts, in which he talked about some feature and the percent of sessions in which it was used. And I thought, well, hold up. I hibernate and rarely restart, whereas many less sophisticated users shut down their computer entirely. So does that mean they effectively are counting those non-power users a lot more than me because they have more sessions?
And then there are other second order effects. If you lose your power users, do they then stop recommending your product, and what then? I see your net promoter score and raise you Goodhart's law (once a measure becomes a target it ceases to become a useful measure)
That brings up an interesting point. It seems to be a conventional wisdom that centrally planned economies don't work (and did not work in cases where they were tried) as well as Western-style capitalism because of the communication and command bottlenecks.
But what if those bottlenecks have been greatly increased in the information age of Internet, other global communication networks, and data collection? The western-capitalist system has the problem of getting stuck in local minima, being driven as a network of actors. What if the downsides of that are finally greater than the performance hit due to central planning bottlenecks?
First, as you say, because of communication bottlenecks. 300 small bakeries (number made up) keep a better eye on how much bread is needed in Manhattan than a technocrat in DC, or even Albany. As you say, we now have the communication technology to overcome that.
But second, there is the command problem. You may be able to get the data there, but who's going to make the decisions? They were made by 300 (or however many) bakery owners; now they're going to be made by one or a few people. They may have the data, but do they know what to do with it? Do they know enough about bakeries and bread? Do they have the mental capacity to replace 300 people?
This gets worse as you get bigger scale. What if you're not just trying to do the bakeries of Manhattan? What if you're trying to do all the food supply in Manhattan? All of retail in Manhattan? All of retail in the whole country?
The other problem with a commander is that they can decide that they want something, whether or not the data supports it. And their subordinates may decide that they'll get better promotions (or at least keep their jobs) if they 1) do what the commander says and 2) tell the commander what he wants to hear.
Better ability to communicate the data does not fix the second problem at all.
You might be tempted to think of academics as if they're operating independently, almost as if they're in an Ivory Tower where they bless us with missives occasionally as they make deep, apolitical discoveries. But that's just not the case.
There is an entire ecosystem of think tanks and funding to push the neoliberalism agenda. This is entirely self-interested. And it's not necessarily that funding is buying particular opinions. It's that anyone who contradicts this narrative simply gets self-selected out of the academic grants pipeline.
I stend to refer to this as the Tyranny of Austrian Economists [1].
There is an entire industry built to convince people that capitalism is good and collectivism of any kind is bad. It also misattributes the wealth of the developed world to capitalism when it's really about exploitation (eg slavery), colonialism and imperialism.
It's really no different to all the industry funded tobacco research that "proved" how safe smoking was.
Africa isn't poor. The people might generally be poor but Africa is not. It's simply been looted by the West. You don't commit resources to an imperial project that is poor.
If command economies are so unsuccessful why do they need to be isolated and starved (eg Cuba)? Won't they just fail on their own? The whole point is to punish any contradiction to capitalist dogma and to engineer their failure to prove that point.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Austrian_School
The US government never gave bailout and gifts to Intel. The original agreement was profit-sharing with Intel through the CHIPS act is standard with any business wanting the funds. All Trump did specifically for Intel was alter the deal to be an equity stake instead, which will still only be beneficial is Intel is profitable.
Your entire comment is faulting on this premise. Please stop spreading this lie.
But really I was talking generally, such as the bank bailouts in 2008. When a bank normally fails the FDIC comes in and takes control of it including ownership. The shareholders are SOL. In my mind, this is exactly what should've happened to all the banks that were essentially insolvent.
As another example, the US government bailed out LTCM in the 1990s when there was a willing buyer (Warren Buffett).
Emotionally you call it a bailout but it is not and by trying to enforce that fact you are ignoring the truth and pressing a lie.
Plain and simple the CHIPS Act is not a bailout. [0]
[0] “Biden to require chips companies winning subsidies to share excess profits” >> https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-require-companies-winn...
> Recipients who receive more than $150 million in direct funding "will be required to share with the U.S. government a portion of any cash flows or returns that exceed the applicant’s projections by an agreed-upon threshold," the department said.
> Companies winning funding are also prohibited from using chips funds for dividends or stock buybacks, and must provide details of any plans to buy back their own shares over five years. The department will consider an "applicant’s commitments to refrain from stock buybacks."
Blaming real-world problems on nominalized abstractions is quite unhelpful, especially when those abstractions are all-encompassing ones like "capitalism" or "financialization" which mostly represent patterns of behavior that have always been present.
Identifying specific shifts in incentives or intentions that resulted in different motivations or intentions becoming dominant is difficult, but there's really little point in engaging these conversations without at least making an attempt to do so.
> As for the author, I suspect he represents the American corporate view that any kind of government intervention (beyond bail outs) cannot work because they don't want that long term. It would reduce profits and/or make a few people slightly less wealthy. They spend a lot of money on propaganda to convince ordinary people that corporatism is good and collectivisim of any kind is bad, that governments aren't capable of anything, etc.
"Corporatism" is collectivism, and much of the critique of these kinds of interventions stems from the correct recognition that political incentives (a) are deeply entwined with commercial ones, not a counterbalance to them, and (b) often have even worse failure modalities than prevailing economic incentives.
Let me just say, for those of us who remember the 1990s and 2000s, Intel's drop off has been something nobody would've predicted. It's hard to overstate just how dominant they were (other than the fairly brief but significant Athlon64 era). And even when they were behind on consumer CPUs, which they were until the Core Duo/Centrino platform (which was really the Pentium 3) saved them from the Pentium 4 disaster, their fab ability was second to none.
So what happened? Capitalism happened. More specifically, financialization happened. Everything US companies does comes down to simply cutting costs and increasing profits for short-term financial performance. There is (now) absolutely no long term thinking. CEOs get parachuted in and stay just long enough to collect a huge golden parachute before the merry-go-round continues. And who are approving these massive CEO pay packets? Other CEOs who sit on the board.
We've seen this exact same thing happen with Boeing. The only things holding Boeing together are the inertia from earlier successes, the 737 type rating monopoly for budget airlines and defense contracting. Just look at the Starliner project to see Boeing actually try to build anything.
An example of this financialization is the likes of Dell, Gateway, IBM, HP, Compaq, etc all started to cut costs by offshoring parts of their operations to Taiwan. At first it was just assembly and then it was certain parts (eg motherboards) and at some point they had completely funded the Taiwan PC industry and created Asus, Acer, MSI, etc. US computer manufacturers completely paid for the Taiwan PC industry by short-term profit seeking.
There are multiple ways to describe China's economy but the most accurate and relevant for this topic is that it's a command economy and the coming years will show just how much more devastatingly effective this will be. Really the only thing stopping Chinese companies from destroying Western competitors is trade barriers (eg BYD).
So I think the US government should take equity interests in companies they bail out rather than just giving them gifts or even loans. The government should (IMHO) also take equity stakes in any extraction companies (eg oil and gas). China shows this can work.
So why won't it work here? Because the administration is both corrupt and incompetent. Everything done by the administration is to line the pockets of politicians and the wealthy on a very short-term basis. You see it in Congressional stock trades (eg buying up Intel ahead of the announcement).
As for the author, I suspect he represents the American corporate view that any kind of government intervention (beyond bail outs) cannot work because they don't want that long term. It would reduce profits and/or make a few people slightly less wealthy. They spend a lot of money on propaganda to convince ordinary people that corporatism is good and collectivisim of any kind is bad, that governments aren't capable of anything, etc.
All Western companies and billionaires want is public-private partnerships because they're a massive wealth transfer from the government to the wealthy. They don't want the government taking away profits from private hands.