Intel Ousts its Chief Marketing Officer

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Intel apparently is not happy with the marketing direction it has taken over the last few years. Certainly pretty drone light shows are fun to look at, but till this day I am not sure what that really had to say about Intel's products. Oregon Live is reporting that Steve Fund is getting the boot, although that is about all we know. Oooo, pretty lights. Thanks cageymaru.

Check out the pretty lights.

Under Fund, Intel's marketing shifted from its historical "Intel Inside" tagline to emphasize aerial drone lightshows and sponsorships at the Olympics, Super Bowl and other high-profile sporting events. Intel sought to use drones and 3D camera systems, neither of which are central to its business, to revitalize its brand and highlight practical applications for technology.
 
Not too surprising considering the difficulties Intel has had this year. Not really sure if marketing is the problem but I guess the lights didn't help much.
 
Sales in the shitter? No, it couldn't be because you are selling overpriced, underperforming chips that overheat if you look at them wrong! (Thanks to thermal paste instead of solder!) No, it's gotta be your marketing! Yeah, that's it! Fire THAT guy! Then you will take over the world again! Right? RIGHT????
 
Doesn't seem like that guy could have done that much damage. It's difficult to erase years of mindshare and market domination overnight.

Maybe someone figured a monkey could do that job, so they decided to go with the cheaper option?
 
hard to market the same old in a different socket year after year.
 
Spectre? Meltdown? Fuck it, must be a marketing problem...

Hey, anyone remember that Intel initially DENIED this shit was going on in their CPUs? Yeah that shit destroys trust over night.
 
Well can you blame them, I've yet to see ads where Spectre and Meltdown are mentioned as features. Get a real conman I mean adman Intel.
 
Intel has been making some interesting changes lately. I guess we'll wait and see if it pays off for them.
 
They are not making enough of a profit. Those yachts are not going to buy themselves.
 
to me what is hurting intel is creating high development products, releasing them late then selling at a higher price.
a. octane/optane? drives ... wow was i hyped for this
b. integrated graphics is crap for 10+ years... now they are shifting to amd
c. they often lead on cpus but amd has closed the gap
d. the nano size shrinkage is impressive, it will be a few years until "super duper small"
e. losing contract for MAC/Apple products. ... to me not putting enough pressure on Apple to upgrade their designs that they let go 3-4 years stale (At same premium price)

eventually I think C and D could be replaced by new technology... if it ever comes about.

They remain a premium product in a world that is about smaller, faster, cheaper.
 
I hate to defend this guy but he hasn't had a whole lot of positive products to market in the last 5+ years outside of optane and the new 8+ cores.

Each cpu gen offers maybe 5-10% increase over previous same make and honestly even that's a generous estimate other than a new feature here and there but man do those prices continue to climb. Pay to play raid keys?!? Half baked patches for Spectre/Meltdown. Let's face it, getting away from intel inside might have been a good thing for now.
 
lostin3d said:
I hate to defend this guy but he hasn't had a whole lot of positive products to market in the last 5+ years outside of optane and the new 8+ cores.

Each cpu gen offers maybe 5-10% increase over previous same make and honestly even that's a generous estimate other than a new feature here and there but man do those prices continue to climb. Pay to play raid keys?!? Half baked patches for Spectre/Meltdown. Let's face it, getting away from intel inside might have been a good thing for now.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but a successful Marketing / Advertising department can sell a Turd on Stick and you'll thank them for the opportunity to buy it. For example, both nVidia and ATI have both "upgraded" GPUs by just changing the name and incrementing a digit or two, so marketing the "same old" as something "nifty and new" isn't impossible.

Sure, it's a bit more difficult in the Tech Sector to sell based just on BS with nothing to back it up, but it can be done. Definitely, the "drone shows" were not successful in equating Intel with whatever they expected.
 
Deserved or not... he came on at a pretty bad time for Intel. Sure things looked pretty strong in terms of sales 4 years ago... but at that point it was already clear that ARM had completely chased Intel and x86 out of the mobile/embedded space. The future for Intel and x86 at this point isn't exactly a clear front runner position anymore in any market... chances are we are going to see ARM move into the laptop market more and more, super computers, data centers... and from their Servers and PCs will follow at some point. X86 isn't going to have any markets to itself in the next few years, they are going to need both visionary engineering and marketing... with out both frankly I envision a future 10-15 years down the line where Intel is a shadow of itself making decent ARM server chips or something.

Considering Intel only really executed slight speed bumps each gen the entire time Fund was head of marketing he didn't exactly have much to work with.

5-6 years ago before Funds time was when Intel should have been trying something new to recapture embedded / mobile market share. In the 80s and 90s Intel tried to come up with Intel built embedded low power type chips ... and projects like i960 where ahead of their time. (instead of scrapping the inhouse Intel tech to make strongarms and then xscale... Intel should have got to work) Sadly Intel hasn't had any visionary engineering happening imo since Fred Pollack (lead engineer on iAPX432, i960, and the Pentium pro retired in 2001). Their Atom chips have never really been up to the challenge... I mean nothing to market there, and then in 2016 they canceled the Atom Broxton chips. The awful truth is there really hasn't been much to warrant big marketing pushes the last 4 years, so wasting time with mind share drone displays was as good a a way to burn the marketing budget as any.
 
ChadD said:
The awful truth is there really hasn't been much to warrant big marketing pushes the last 4 years, so wasting time with mind share drone displays was as good a a way to burn the marketing budget as any.
Click to expand...
The push for them came from Brian, not this guy..
 
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