This situation has been and maybe always will be common. Those who view themselves as integrated manufacturers of *products* often cannot equally package, deliver, and sell their component *services*. No matter how good those services are at delivering the end product—and sometimes they are completely world-class or genuinely unique—they're almost always highly designed, refined, and evolved over years to map to the specific end products and their one business. They are NOT designed, refined, or evolved to be reusable, retargetable capabilities for all interested parties.<p>By any rights, the major systems manufacturers of the 2000s—Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems—should have had an enormous leg up in becoming the planetary scale, "red shift" cloud computing providers of today. Let's kick major operating environment vendors of that era in for good measure—Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware. Maybe even Oracle and SAP. They had the technical capabilities, the economies of scale, the vendor ecosystems, the customer relationships, the financial might. "Permission to win." Yet, only a few have made it. Microsoft has made the transition with Azure, but it's been a long hard pull. Maybe a few participation trophies for IBM and Oracle. But as a group, where are they, cloud-wise? Not too impressive that AWS and Google and others that had no classic "required assets" or "permission to win" have wiped them off the playing field or kicked them deep into the "others" bin.<p>You can call that classic innovator's dilemma, and there's a lot to that. It's insanely, unfathomably hard to disrupt your own current successful business for new delivery models and aspirations. But there's something else as well: services and products are different beasts. They take different mindsets, expectations, business models, and metrics. All the best to Intel in becoming that new thing, a service provider. But it not just a side gig or slight extension. It's a radically different thing, and it's no wonder the highly successful product Intel of 2011 wasn't also a good service provider.