Blog FeedThe Inmates are Running the Asylum
Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door, or so the saying goes. At Intel however, having failed to build a better mouse trap, these days they’re changing their image in hopes of fooling people. So this is where we’re at. Intel has stalled, and they really don’t seem to have any magic right now. Making things worse, the company is less and less in the hands of it’s engineers, and to right the ship they’re turning to marketing. Ditching the Intel Inside logo, to me, is a blatant act of unwarranted desperation. They’re actually facing the same problem another tech-giant is battling right now; just like Sony the inmates are running the asylum.
Sony is a company in serious financial straights. They can’t get their electronics division to make money like it used to. It may still be one of the best out there but it’s competitors got a lot better and managed to undercut them on price while offering a decent quality of equipment. As their competitors have become better, they have fallen back on advertisements and the media divisions to make ends meet. This has had serious downsides though as the media group has been leaving the electronics people hamstrung so often that it’s made it very difficult for them to catch up. This is particularity true when it comes to digital players which have really overtaken the walkman. Sony was the last company to allow portable media players to play MP3s because they wanted to push their own proprietary Atrac format. Further still, incidents like the XCP root kit fiasco are really hurting Sony’s image because the media people were afraid of the piracy bogey-man.
Intel’s situation is a bit different but it’s the same too. They’re the number 1 maker of CPUs in the world. They’ve got about a 55 percent lead on AMD who’s in second place. They have a cozy deal with the world’s largest PC maker Dell, and a good deal with Apple coming up as well. But the brass there is scared. They seem to think that personal computer’s aren’t really going to be such a big deal, that integrated devices are where it’s at - like medical computers, PDAs etc. As such they’re restructuring their company to go after this stuff. They’re also really ramping up the marketing. The only problem is they’re not solving their problems. They’re not hiring huge numbers of engineers to take on these new markets like they did the PC market. Furthermore they’re still a few generations of chips behind AMD. Not only are they allegedly behind AMD in chip design, but an equivilant Intel chip is typically more expensive product than an AMD version. In response to that Intel isn’t fixing the technology problems. They’re rebranding, expanding into new fronts and hoping that the problems will be solved.
Both these companies need to remember that they’re electronics companies. They need to go back to the drawing board and start building better mouse traps for less than their competitors’ mouse traps so to speak. But neither of them are really doing that - they’re doing just about everything else. I think these are both awesome companies that I grew up thinking were really cool, but now they just seem like so much hot air. The difference is they seemed coolest, oddly enough, when the engineers were running the show and the tech was the star. Now that celebrities at posh parties are the stars at these companies they both seem rather dull. It wasn’t all that long ago that Jason Rubin, founder of Naughty Dog commented at GDC that he had a hard time getting an invite to Sony’s E3 party, whereas Tara Reid was given a first class reception. As an enthusiast for games and technology, people like Jason Rubin frankly are a whole lot more interesting to me and far more likely to sell Sony or Intel products than Tara Reid or any other little starlet. Intel has thrown similar bashes at events like CES and the like. Put the geeks in front; they’re the ones who are going to make you succeed or fail.
4th January | Reply
It is indeed an interesting decision for Intel to change both their logo and tag line given that both are some of the most recognised in the world because, frankly, you can’t buy that sort of position easily. In this regard this seems much like when the UK Royal Mail decided that it was no longer in the business of delivering letters and rebranded itself as Insignia, a name that meant bugger-all to everyone. Needless to say that this didn’t last long and someone evidentially smacked the management around the head. Whether Intel needs the same remains to be seen since although the “Leap Ahead” line doesn’t really mean anything (”Intel Inside” was at least pretty explicit in its meaning), the logo hasn’t exactly changed much and, if I’m to be honest, I actually like this new one more.
As for whether Intel has lost the plot in terms of its products, I’m going to wait until the end of the year before commenting. I’m due to replace my laptop at the end of the year and given the Intel/Apple deal it will undoubtably contain either a Yonah or Merom-based processor. Whether these processors are inferior to what AMD or IBM are producing remains to be seen but I’m pretty confident that it’ll beat the shit out of what I am already running so I’m unlikely to be disappointed.
4th January | Reply
The laptop thing is perhaps the one area where Intel is showing signs of life. But as a gamer Intel is a dead choice to me right now, as a desktop user Intel doesn’t really offer a compelling reason to choose them.
They’re behind though in most every category that counts. Low Budget stuff they’re behind. 64 bit processors AMD is beating the tar out of them, as in multicore as well. Tom’s Hardware recently did a chart of a fuckton of AMD and Intel CPUs And the really pathetic thing was AMD had 13-22 processors outperform everything on Intel’s line on gaming tests. In Audio applications it was 10 and CPU intensive apps like Winrar 5 so.
22 AMD processors outperformed Intel processors on Direct X 9 tests. That’s not a victory for AMD. That’s not a victory for AMD that’s an ass kicking on a grand scale, I can see the mobs of hardware nuts burning them in effigy now. Intel my entire life was the prestige brand; AMD the penny-pincher brand. Now Intel is what the processor for brand whores and laptops only?
5th January | Reply
I guess it all depends on perspective. For me the only important type of processor is a mobile processor because a desktop is a pretty pointless device for me. At the present time Intel is looking pretty good in that area so as far as I am concerned its all good.
Now, if Intel did the same as IBM and Freescale by not delivering a suitable laptop processor that could keep pace with the AMD equivalent (i.e. no G5-powered PowerBook), then I’d be pissed.
Good luck to AMD and all but I’m going to be stuck with Intel unless Apple signs a deal with them as well. The choice, it has to be said, would be nice but I doubt that I’d really notice the difference.
5th January | Reply
I don’t ever remember someone in my household owning a Sony product other than a walkman. Now half the family has iPods, you can see where that relegates Sony’s old technology.
As for Intel, I am happy for them to do silly things like this. It was Intel’s superior marketing that has kept them in the top spot for processor market share, and if they feel like throwing that away, then all the better for the underdog, who really deserves a bigger share of the pie. My last 3 processors have all been AMD, and the choice has always been blindingly obvious.
6th January | Reply
I really like Sony as a company. Usually their products are high quality and high specs. However, I think Sony really sunk themselves with HDTVs. They were also the last in the game for HDTVs and if you look at any sony HDTV it is about $700+ more expensive than all of the others. I haven’t purchased any Sony electronics in a long time purely because their prices are just outrageous. With so many companies getting tech branches and putting out quality products for inexpensive prices its hard to shell out so much for the Sony name.
They have also sunk a lot of money into this Cell tech with no payback yet. The PS3 just may be Sony’s savior because their electronics sure as hell aren’t cutting it.
As for intel I’ve never owned one. I care little for the company since I have built my computers since the Voodoo 3 days. AMD was always inexpensive and more than suitable. Now AMD leads the pack and are still less expensive. I personally think the logo change is pretty lame. I wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t pointed out in an article.
6th January | Reply
Sony’s pricing is killing them. My Dad, who is the electronics purchaser in this house, has always gone with Sony in the past 10 years, simply because of their quality, and the way their products look - you’re not going to buy some ugly-ass 42″ TV for your front room, are you?
But with companies like Samsung being cheaper, and having just as sexy designs on their DVD Players/TVs, I can see Sony having to change. I hope they do it quick too, since I doubt they’ll make significant amounts of money from the PS3 if they want to fend off Microsoft, who have a limitless supply of money.
6th January | Reply
Just touching on marketing…
Has anyone else seen the commercials for the PSP featuring rodents with “urban” vocal stylings and dustballs with “la raza” vocal stylings? Sony has name recognition. They hardly even use it in these commercials.
What’s worse is these commercials don’t mention all the media features of the PSP, nor do they really talk about the games, just cheese you can listen to outside or guns shooting love potion…which now that I write it up, looks disturbingly like gross sexual innuendo coming from a dustbunny.
Anyway, I don’t think either company has any idea how to leverage their brand names in the face of stiff competition. Did Sony seriously believe Apple would be no threat, or that they would just waltz in and take the handheld market from the strangle-hold of Nintendo, without serious marketing muscle?
Same goes for Intel, the last time…the only time I upgraded/built my computer, I was looking at Intel vs. AMD, and the clear choice, based solely on economics, was AMD. Five years later, and the choice is STILL clear cut. What has Intel been doing? Releasing thousand dollar processors that don’t perform as well as rival processors at half the cost.
I’m rambling. It’s late, and I’m tired. I’ll wrap up. Neither Sony nor Intel has built a better mousetrap in years. To top it off, you are absolutely correct the marketing suits are running the companies, and as anyone whose read two strips of Dilbert will know, marketing is generally full of retards who know nothing about their product.
10th January | Reply
I’d say your perspective is a bit too much one-sided. They had a pretty shitty generation of desktop CPU’s. They, including engineering, choose the wrong route, AMD got it right. A comparison with Sony may be a bit premature. Only time will tell, but maybe it’s more like an nVidia tale. After one generation of underperforming GPU’s, they are now competitive or better. I’d say we wait another generation to call for a judgement.
16th January | Reply
Well, it get’s stupider.
Intel has decided to drop the “Pentium” name from their future products and just call them by ambiguous nonsensical terms.
People like saying the word “Pentium”. Even after a decade it still sounds cool. These guys have completely lost the plot.