• Hugin@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    The company had always been run by engineers that came up from chip fab. Then they fired both the CEO and the head of fab for sexual harassment.

    Then they make the CFO with a MBA the new CEO. A year or two latter and chip design is having problems and fab is falling behind.

    • Angry_Autist (he/him)@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The more I see MBAs taking c-suite positions, the quicker the company collapses. Seen it more than six times now in person, and countless in the news.

      I wonder how long before they notice.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        5 months ago

        The people who make those decisions are insulated from the consequence

        Forcing them to take responsibility is the only solution

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Well, when I was learning about economics being 8 or 9 year old, it seemed for me how it should be.

        A person or a group knowledgeable in some area find a bottleneck, some problem to solve, start a company, it grows, it becomes big. Then the next generation is what they pick for leadership, and picking people is always worse than the evolutionary mechanism of a company finding some bottleneck to be widened being gunshot faster than the rest. Then they pick their replacement. And so on. Eventually it dies, but since technologies are patented, they do not become actual secrets, only commercial secrets, and by the time a company dies the patents expire, so everybody can replace it for the humanity.

        The niche that company discovered thus becomes competitive.

        In our world, if patents would expire as fast as they did initially by design, these big companies would already be dead.

        But they’ve bent the rules to make patents virtually eternal and thus big zombie companies are strangling the humanity.

        The system wasn’t bad, but eventually power changed it.

        • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          You are missing economies of scale. In most industries these create a significant barrier to entry. The patent may expire but the equipment is still expensive.

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I’m not missing them. One thing is a

            significant barrier

            and another is legal monopoly.

            Especially abominations like patenting an ISA. It’s clear from the very beginning that an ISA is not an invention moving humanity forward, it’s an interface. A language.

            As of gigantic companies of today not finding replacement when they die - we would have the whole spectrum if not for IP and patent laws as they exist. For some uses MCs of 80s are sufficient. For some a desktop PC of 1993. For some a desktop PC of 1999.

            I dunno why I’m writing these things, Marcus Aurelius has written many wise things, one of them is the advice not to think about things out of your control.

    • juice702@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Sounds similar to what happened to Boeing. Once ran by engineers now ran by people suckling the teat of board members. Quality goes down, profits go up for these assholes.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Intel fell behind on chip manufacturing while the CEO came from that department.
      Allegedly because their strategy was too ambitious at the time, or at least that was the official excuse at the time.
      So your summary is not entirely fair.