last highlighted date: 2024-11-14
Highlights
- As for Boeing, what can you say about an aircraft manufacturer whose planes crash and doors blow off in mid-air? Oh, and which now appears unable to bring its spaceship, Starliner, down from orbit? I want it on the record that I predicted the Boeing astronauts would end up needing to hitch a ride with a SpaceX Dragon to get back to Earth.
- It’s not like Intel hasn’t had chip problems before. I’m old enough to remember Intel’s 1994 floating-point division bug in its Pentium processors. And, as a hardcore Linux user, I know all too much about how the Meltdown and Spectre security problems let hackers steal passwords and how Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel developer crew had to fight like the devil to fix the problem. Linus was not happy.
- Why is all this happening? I think it’s the result of poor management decisions and underinvestment in critical manufacturing technologies. In particular, it was how Intel prioritized business strategies and financial performance over engineering excellence.
- Intel also made several strategic blunders. Chipzilla’s decision to pass on producing chips for the iPhone, considering the mobile market unprofitable, was a critical error. Would Arm even exist, never mind dominating the mobile space, if Intel had played its cards right? Seriously, did anyone ever believe that Intel Atom processors would power iPhones? I don’t think so!