I do remember feeling a little disappointed when Paul Otellini was announced as CEO. Paul's an impressive guy, and a local boy, but he is an econ major/MBA, and I always find it a little depressing to learn that a venerable tech company will now be led by someone without a strong engineering or science background.<p>Actually, I think "first non-technical CEO" probably deserves a notch on a technology company's time line. It doesn't mean that the company won't succeed, but it is a sign that it has become a different type of company (this may be more a reflection of this change than a cause).<p>But unlike some other high profile flame-outs, it sounds like Otellini was a success at the helm.
What a legacy -- he retires the same day that Intel wins. AMD just ceded the high margin CPU business to concentrate on the volume CPU business. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804602" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804602</a><p>Otellini's successor will be playing a different game, fighting ARM rather than AMD.
Bummed to see that the financial achievements were noted before the technical ones (and that the true technical achievements were relegated to a single bullet point).<p>This is hard to do at scale:
"* Achieved breakthrough innovations, including High-K/Metal gate and now 3-D Tri-gate transistors; and dramatic improvement in energy efficiency of Intel processors"
I work for Intel, and I congratulate Paul on his tenure.<p>On the whole, I would say most of my engineer colleagues approve of Paul's leadership, MBA or otherwise :).<p>It will be interesting to see if Intel's next CEO decides to take any exciting new turns. Particularly with respect to the PC market, we live in interesting times.
Nit pick: The article says he's been at Intel for "nearly 40 years". According to Wikipedia he joined the company in 1974 [1]. Still a long time though.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini#Employment_at_Intel" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini#Employment_at_Int...</a>
A good time for him to leave before the downwards trend of Intel becomes more obvious, and people start blaming it on him. I hope he leaves the board of Google, too, because I don't like how he has influenced some of Google's decisions in the past few years, to use Intel chips instead of ARM in their new devices, and every single one of them turned out to be the wrong decision.