Intel CEO Paul Otellini:
”We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”
So basically, Otellini is the Pete Best of the tech business.
“On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel’s XScale assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell the XScale business to Marvell for an estimated USD 600 million in cash and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The acquisition was completed on November 9, 2006.[3]”
All the smartphone and palmtops were already using ARM.
So Intel believed that smartphones wouldn’t encroach
on Intel’s territory.
It wasn’t 100x more than I thought.
Didn’t Pete Best say yes and end up fired?
I think Ron Wayne is the Pete Best of the tech industry:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/24/apple.forgotten.founder/index.html
the current gross sales over the initial volume jobs & apple hoped to sell?
Yeah, not a great analogy. Fired by Brian Epstein about 10 seconds before Beatlemania. Ouch.
The initial volume Jobs & Apple publicly stated. It seemed obvious to me that the iPhone was a game changer & they would sell an insane amount of them.
To be fair Verizon also said no about the iPhone, it was ahead of it’s time. And AT&T barely committed to it.