Do they still have it? He left around the turn of the century so it seems like a better argument would be that having an immensely profitable company puts you at risk of having caretaker CEOs who will be optimizing for Wall Street analysts rather than success.

A better target would be Itanium: that was in his era and showed the danger of picking the wrong gamble. They wanted a proprietary platform which couldn’t be copied by AMD, Cyrix, etc. but they staked the whole exercise on a highly speculative CPU design and made a number of horrible tactical errors like trying to screw a few million in compiler licensing out of developers at the time when their multi-billion bet-the-company investment crucially depended on developers porting to a chip which was critically dependent on having the best compiler. Being paranoid about preventing competition lead them to be shockingly cavalier about their plans being robust.

Intel has embraced the complacent culture for 30 years. Perf/watt is meaningless, phones won’t be a big market, nothing can displace x86 in the datacenter, nobody else can fab like we do…

The paranoid culture cannot predict the future.

BTW Andy was not the CEO in times of this inflection point.

Isn't it because it had ceased to exist before these troubles began? Grove has left Intel 19 years ago, and cessed to be its CEO 25 years ago.

Sounds to me like they weren't paranoid enough

The ones that were lead by Andy Grove wasn't there at Intel.

i think we're forgetting Intel's backdoor https://hackaday.com/2023/04/12/disabling-intels-backdoors-o...