INTC and More Money for Me

Some people are Intel haters... For fear of vertical integration or just falling behind (re: Sandy Bridge or Cyclone) but I still see a bright spot for Intel. In business school we often read about the rise and falls of companies in their respective industries, and, almost like morbid stock analysts, we actually kind of cheer when a company falls from grace (when Apple's stock price dipped earlier this summer, I can't tell you how many people gleefully informed me that this was "the beginning of the end" to which I responded that the stock price is still in the hundreds.. as in, more than one hundred). But why are we so mean? Is it really even mean-ness? I think it's more the fact that when companies fail, it just makes for good reading fodder later.

Someone at HBS will write a fun back story for us about a business school student who suddenly thought about some underlying, fundamental problem. His name will be something generic, like Chad, and these ideas will suddenly come to him. His professors or connections will magically be able to offer time and resources, and he'll learn that what he learns in class at business school is applicable after all!

But I digress. Intel has always been known to be buttoned up-- pretty up tight-- the khakis and blue shirt uniform in a hoodies and jeans-type world. Their two-in-a-box leadership pitted two specialist leaders together in a partnership to guide their teams toward goals. They lead by challenging. It's a far cry from the meditation rooms at Google's office. Regardless of whether you agree with their leadership style, no one can argue that they don't know chips.They're good at it. They've done it for a long time. A lot of the industry still depends on them. They have been slow to adopt the new ways of thinking that have been pushed forward with the mobile generation.

They're going to be successful because, honestly, they're so big that they have a lot of gas left. If they don't introduce their Broadwell chips to some amazing reviews/innovations (this means no more delays), then they'll eventually run out of gas. But they're really cheap right now, and I can foresee an uptick when they finally introduce their new chips. In the long run? They're probably a sell. They don't have a ton going for them and they're not diversified. BUT they have the resources to innovate. Time will tell if they decide to capitalize on their current resources.