Wow. Saddens me. I had the opportunity to meet Paul a couple of times when I worked at Intel. Paul always impressed me as a great executive and a great person.<p>I have long believed that Paul is the best post-Grove CEO that Intel has had. Otellini was as good of a CEO as Grove, better in certain ways (consumer marketing instincts). His tenure was not as long as Grove's and is under-appreciated for that reason only.
He was a very nice person who I greatly liked but as an alumni I'm saddened at the architectural missteps that plagued the company such as the Pentium 4 architecture changes that otherwise cost billions of shareholder value. There was a vocal part of engineering who were disappointed a finance guy was in charge for the first time.
I interned at Intel in 2002. We (all the interns) were invited to hear him speak. At the time, I didn't know who we was, but he was some exec and, well, it's always cool to listen to execs.<p>I don't remember much of his speech, but when I remember most was bumping into him in the stairwell on my way to the speech. My eyes landed on his badge, and I said something like, "hey, I'm about to go listen to you talk."<p>We had one of the most friendly conversations I had.
This is going to sound really heartless: Imagine working for the same company your entire adult life, retiring and dying 4 years later.<p>The thought of that, as a 26-year old, terrifies me.
He seems to have led a winderful and impactful life but it's a little shocking when so many people in the news, who seemingly led healthy lives, pass away in their 60s . :(<p>Why is this happening?
This might be a tad off-topic for HN, but the dates seem like an odd coincidence: I am noticing that, per Wikipedia, Otellini was born 8 days before Tom Petty, and they died on the same day.<p>Edit: it may be a silly observation I have made, but hn users are really silly to downvote this.
Second paragraph dives straight into corporate quarterly bonus bullet point bullshit! What about the human! This is easily the worst in memoriam I think I've ever seen. Written by some HR droid? What an embarrassment, I think I just discovered why I'd never, ever work for Intel