Back in 1997, Andy Grove, then chief executive officer of Intel, became one of the first corporate titans to embrace the teachings of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Sensing that Intel might be undercut by PC chip rivals with cheaper wares, Grove invited Christensen to speak to his team about industrial leaders of the past who had waited too long to address emerging threats. Within a few quarters, Intel had brought out a line of lower-end Celeron chips for PCs, which pretty much smashed the dreams of Intel wannabes such as Advanced Micro Devices. “Innovator’s dilemma” averted.
Intel is no longer a case study in adaptability. On the contrary, it has whiffed in the market for mobile chips used in smartphones and tablets, by far the largest new opportunity for chip makers in the past 10 years. On April 19, the same day it said it would cut 12,000 jobs, Intel scrapped development of some of its mobile Atom chips despite years of heavy investment. And for the past few years, the world’s largest chip maker has seemed indifferent to another potentially vast market: the one in chips designed for the artificial--intelligence technique known as deep learning.
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