Bill Gates is joining the chorus of tech executives, experts, critics, and pundits who are shocked at Intel’s fall from grace.
Few companies’ fates and fortunes were so intertwined as Microsoft and Intel, with the latter’s chips powering the personal computers that ran Microsoft Windows. As a result, Gates has a unique perspective on Intel’s current woes.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Gates expressed his shock at Intel’s current situation.
“I am stunned that Intel basically lost its way,” Gates said. “(Intel co-founder) Gordon Moore always kept Intel at the state of the art. And now they are kind of behind in terms of chip design and they are kind of behind in chip fabrication. And both of those are very capital intensive. They missed the AI chip revolution, and with their fabrication capabilities, they don’t even use standards that people like Nvidia and Qualcomm find easy. I thought Pat Gelsinger was very brave to say, ‘No, I am going to fix the design side, I am going to fix the fab side.’ I was hoping for his sake, for the country’s sake that he would be successful. I hope Intel recovers, but it looks pretty tough for them at this stage.”
Gates’ comments about Gelsinger were especially telling, since Gelsinger was the first engineer-CEO in some time, after a string of CEOs that lacked significant technical experience or expertise. Gelsinger set about returning Intel to its engineering roots, but ultimately the board of directors grew impatient with how long a turnaround was taking and forced Gelsinger out.
Things have gone from bad to worse for Intel, with the company being the subject of takeover rumors and still having no clear direction for returning to its former glory. The company is also backpedaling on some of its most promising chips designs in years, raising questions about its ability to continue innovating.
Microsoft’s Missed Opportunity
In his AP interview, Gates also discussed one of Microsoft’s biggest missed opportunities, namely Google’s Android. Because Microsoft was dealing with the fallout of its loss in the antitrust case the use government brought against the company, Gates says he was too distracted to respond to Google’s ascendancy and its development of Android.
“The success of Google is an amazing thing, they led the way on search,” Gates said. “The area that Google did well in that would not have happened had I not been distracted is Android, where it was a natural thing for me. I was trying, although what I didn’t do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone. That was ours for the taking.
“Google is the first company that comes along that is like us, that’s trying to hire as many smart people as they can. And, even though search was important to them, they just decided to do YouTube and Office-type software and cloud-type infrastructure. They did a lot of things. Our other competitors up to that point were single-product companies. So that competition with Google has been very healthy. I don’t envy anyone having antitrust problems but in America, if you are hyper-successful, it’s almost like confirmation that, ‘Wow, you must have done really well., and now they are wondering how to tame you. Microsoft learned a lot and, so far, by and large, we have stayed out of trouble since then.”
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