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Wow. A ton of people. It says in the article the layoffs were long overdue..which is kind of interesting.
With these huge companies that have so many employees sometimes I always wonder ...what do they all do?
It's not surprising that with mobile a lot of people are moving away from PCs. It does suck for the employees.
The amount of PCs being sold is going down. Victim of their own success, mobile computing has exploded and PCs need to be replaced less due to their power.
Maybe but how do you have a company where 12,000 people are there getting a paycheck and not being productive?..
It's pretty amazing right?
Just a guess, but it has to do with a change in focus. You're probably familiar with the "Intel Inside" ingredient branding program. Over the past 25 years, Intel has had co-marketing programs with all the PC manufacturers where if, say, HP advertises a personal computer in print or TV or on the web promoting it using the "Intel Inside" logo and the "intel bong" then Intel rebates to the PC vendor a portion of the money spent on purchasing the CPUs in the first place. It is a very successful ingredient branding program. It is also very expensive.
So, because PC shipments are declining, and the Intel brand is very successfully established as the premiere CPU vendor, Intel probably is cutting that program back.
There are probably hundreds of Intel employees who come to work every day reviewing the submissions of the PC vendors asking for those rebates, reviewing compliance with the rules of the program, tweaking terms of the program, communicating tweaks to vendors, resolving conflicts & escalations, etc.
Once you start to move away from PCs, then you don't need as many people keeping Intel's market segment share high within any given PC company (Dell, HP, Toshiba, Samsung, Asus, etc). You don't need hundreds of people administering the Intel Inside program anymore.
When Intel acquired DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), it acquired rights to manufacture ARM. It did so, extending the instruction set and calling it Intel XScale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale
Unfortunately, XScale did not have the gross margins of Intel Architecture CPUs. XScale died of starvation.
One of the problems Intel faces is few things have the gross margins associated with high end CPUs. So, when Intel starts a new business line, that line will have lower gross margins. The successful the product line is, the lower the average gross margin of Intel's bottom line and hence its share price -- and then the powers-that-be kill it off.
Then, the powers-that-be lament the fact that Intel is essentially a single product line company.
The amount of PCs being sold is going down. Victim of their own success, mobile computing has exploded and PCs need to be replaced less due to their power.
Desktop PC market is fast going the way of the Dodo. Really is amazing how fast technology moves these days. The PC revolution really took hold in the 1990's and in about a decade and a half later (more or less) are now being replaced by tablets, smart phones, lap tops, etc....
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