Rogue employee leaked Intel secrets

".. Obviously, the webcast was not for public consumption and no doubt the INQ was not supposed to hear it or maybe even know of it. But a company of over 80,000 employees is not so much a firm, it's more like a small town with the community tied together by stronger bonds than most average Western European towns today. .."

In other words, it is easy to breach Intel walls by finding a rogue employee willing to sell confidential details to scum bag internet sites.

Chuck "Snowboard9"

[Goodbye Chuck. You're not allowed to read the INQ any more. Ed.]

Hi Mike,

I was reading your article on what Intel is going to do for the next 12-18 months and thought I would comment to you.

I spent a number of years at Intel and had the opportunity to deal with both Craig Barrett and Paul Otellini. If you look at Intels lack of focus it started about 7ish years ago? This was about the time that Craig started to exert control over Intel.

Intel spent many $B's acquiring companies in the networking business, graphics business and in other technologies. Every one of those areas has been a bust for Intel and its shareholders. I would hear how Intel would be another Cisco and how we would beat Nvidia and ATI at their own game. Look where we are now. Billions gone and nothing to show for it.

Craig is a smart man but he truly lacks vision in developing new products. Remember he came aboard and standardized our manufacturing processes. He can talk processes all day. But he hates the risk that comes with new product areas. We were repeatedly told we need guarantees up front that a product would make the same ROIs as our microprocessors. Nothing will ever generate those margins. And he absolutely hates being challenged in any way over products. Disagree and commit? His view was disagree and leave (the firm).

Otellini is interesting. On one hand his background is in the finance world. He wants high margins, he craves those high margins. He does have a tendency to manage from a finance perspective. But he understands Intel is stuck with a one product business - microprocessors. And Intel needs to move past that. Intel does have an over capacity problem and doesnt know what to do with it.

Intel will do a lot better when Craig leaves and we can only hope that Paul will put the finance skills in his back pocket and let the new products flow again. Keep your eyes on Paul once Barrett is gone. We will have to see which side emerges from him. The hard core financial analyst that cuts heads to balance the balance sheet or the visionary CEO that brings new markets and products to a struggling company.

It would be appreciated if you kept my name/email to yourself.

Holy Canada!

Hello nfarrell,

I do not know the motivations of most of the people who wish to immigrate, but I can speak of a lot of those of us on the "twisted" left. We are tired of being the leppars of a country led by a cabile of people that seem to have misplaced priorities. We on the "twisted left" are simply tired of taxation without representation. We have been trying to deal with this issue since the first election of Regan, and it has gotten wearisome. Some of us "twisted leftists" believe in the separation of church and state and believe it is dangerous not to.The invasion of Iraq ( I could rant about this all day)and the latest election were the final straws in the insanity in the United States. We are, Quite frankly, scared and disillusioned. When the military budget of one nation meets the same budget as every other country on the earth, something has gone terribly WRONG! It is an indication that that nation is failing it's people. Some, (speaking of the people who elected this administration) are just too blind and stupid to see the truth. We (twisted leftists) don't care about a Queen, we want to be represented by any entity that stands for common sense and reason, not some invisible man in the sky. If that means a Queen, then so be it.

Best regards
Elaine

May Microsoft go to Hell!

Let them go to hell, they didn't give BeOS a break. And had they been prevented from illegally killing BeOS my guess is that we would by now have had many of the features originally promised in Longhorn several years ago just through the benefits of free-market competition with

BeOS.

Simon T

Tarantella, Tarantula, Tormentium

I am impressed with how you printed the story exactly as the executive team wants. (They need there to be as much interest as possible to try to bump the price as much as possible).

Here are some better questions for you to ask:

If anyone does buy the company, how many more skeletons will they end up with. This is an example:

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/041025/ttla.ob8-k.html

A lot of people have left over the last few years.

Why would someone buy the company for the product? If the product was good, the revenues would be. Don't look at the most recent revenues - instead take the last 4 years and draw a trend line. Also note that most enterprise sales are done "with maintenance" which means that the money is recognised over 4 quarters. Sales could be plummeting but the recurring maintenance revenue would make things look better than they actually are.

Why would someone buy the company for the people? Given how much the company has shrunk, who is actually left? How many of the original people/management/engineers/sales are there?

How much would the sale be for? About a year ago, someone invested $16m. They are going to want to get back as much of that as possible. There are other investors. Frank Wilde and team compensated themselves more in shares than in cash.

.Net and J2EE are irrelevant to what Tarantella does. Citrix (ICA) and Microsoft (RDP) are the equivalent on the Windows side, with VNC and the like on the UNIX side. Why would someone want to own another display protocol (Tarantella's AIP)? [If you look a bit, you'll find Sun has a project for a new display protocol out of their research group]

Overall, parts of Tarantella do have value, there are/were good people. But does it have enough now to be worth anyone buying? And if they thought there was any interest, wouldn't they write a friendly journo and try to propagate the idea there are multiple suitors?

[Name, email supplied. Ed]

AMD's European distribution like patchwork quilt

Just went to URL posted in your article, one with AMD distibutor list, and went to Croatia (as this is where I live).. They missed names of 1/3rd of their distributors :) Ok, so there are only 3 there :> But it's "M SAN" not "SCAN" :) I though.. you'll know whom to bug with this bug better than me.. I wouldn't be surprised if Imtel from Serbia/Belgrade was actualy really Intel after all :D

Best regards to everyone in the Inq!

P.S. Oh, and one mistake of yours as well, Montenegro has 1 "stockist" listed after all, not zero like you've mentioned.. Maybe there are more mistakes, I just didn't look around much :)

Name supplied