Intel's Big Review Completed

Back in May, I noted that Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, was conducting a major review of Intel's troubled operations. In this post, and this one, I opined that perhaps Intel is the victim of its considerable success of the past 20 years. And that its current sales and marketing troubles are quite possibly a natural result of too much growth, diversification, and loss of detailed customer focus over the years.

Now comes a piece in the Wall Street Journal announcing Otellini's fixes for the firm. Apparently, two and a half months of soul-searching and deep analysis at Intel has resulted in a senior management reorganization of roles. Two retirements, no firings, and, otherwise, just a shuffling of spans of control, reporting lines, and such. The stated goal of all this shuffling is improved efficiency.

Given that Intel's problems seem to stem from not listening to customers, I'm a little puzzled to read that their solution is to rearrange current senior managment, but not directly address competitive marketing and product development. If anything, the apparent assignment of development and pricing activities to single senior executives would seem to make those functions even more abstracted from individual customers and business units.

Maybe I'm wrong. Time will tell. But thus far, it's fairly disappointing to see Intel limit its rehabilitation to essentially rearranging deck chairs, while AMD continues to surge forward with sales and market share growth.