They took technical risks that didn't pan out. They thought they'd be able to solve whatever problems they ran into, but they couldn't. They didn't know ahead of time that the result was going to suck. If you try to run an actual tech company, like Intel, without taking any technical risks, competitors who do take technical risks will leave you in the dust.

This doesn't apply to fake tech companies like AirBnB, Dropbox, and Stripe, and if you've spent your career at fake tech companies, your intuition is going to be "off" on this point.

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twoodfin 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They also aimed at what turned out to be the wrong target: When Itanium was conceived, high-performance CPUs were for technical applications like CAD and physics simulation. Raw floating point throughput was what mattered. And Itanium ended up pretty darn good at that.

But between conception and delivery, the web took over the world. Branchy integer code was now the dominant server workload & workstations were getting crowded out of their niche by the commodity economics of x86.

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kuschku 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for this comment - that's a beautiful perspective I hadn't considered before. A clean and simple definition of technology as everything that increases human productivity.

Now I can finally explain why some "tech" jobs feel like they're just not moving the needle.

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eru 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Computer hardware isn't the only 'tech' that exists, you know?

Problems in operations research (like logistics) or fraud detection can be just as technical.

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kragen 3 days ago | parent [-]

Fraud detection is a Red Queen's race. If the amount of resources that goes into fraud detection and fraud commission grows by 10×, 100×, 1000×, the resulting increase in human capacities and improvement in human welfare will be nil. It may be technically challenging but it isn't technology.

Operations research is technology, but Uber isn't Gurobi, which is a real tech company like Intel, however questionable their ethics may be.

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pjc50 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It may be technically challenging but it isn't technology.

This feels like a distinction without a difference based on whether kragen thinks something is hardcore enough to count?

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kragen 3 days ago | parent [-]

No, as I explained, it's based on the resulting increase in human capacities and improvement in human welfare. Technology is a collaborative, progressive endeavor in which we advance a skill (techne), generation by generation, through discourse (logos).

Fraud detection can be (and is) extremely hardcore, but it isn't progressive in that way. It's largely tradecraft. Consequently its relationship to novelty and technical risk is fundamentally different.

	▲	eru 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		If fraud detection is the difference between making an online market place work or not, that contributes a lot to human welfare.

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eru 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Operations research is technology, but Uber isn't Gurobi, [...]

Intel isn't ASML, either. They merely use their products. So what?

Presumably Gurobi doesn't write their own compilers or fab their own chips. It's turtles all the way down.

> Fraud detection is a Red Queen's race. If the amount of resources that goes into fraud detection and fraud commission grows by 10×, 100×, 1000×, the resulting increase in human capacities and improvement in human welfare will be nil. It may be technically challenging but it isn't technology.

By that logic no military anywhere uses any technology? Nor is there any technology in Formula 1 cars?

	▲	kragen 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		"So what" is that Intel is making things ASML can't, things nobody has done before, and they have to try things that might not work in order to make things nobody yet knows how to make. Just to survive, they have to do things experts believe to be impossible. AirBnB isn't doing that; they're just booking hotel rooms. Their competitive moat consists of owning a two-sided marketplace and political maneuvering to legalize it. That's very valuable, but it's not the same kind of business as Intel or Gurobi. Nuclear weapons are certainly a case that tests the category of "technology" and which, indeed, sparked widespread despair and abandonment of progressivism: they increase human capabilities, but probably don't improve human welfare. But I don't think that categories become meaningless simply because they have fuzzy edges.