Intel eyes subscriptions to grow software sales from 2021's $100m Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lately said he wants to grow his company's software business "rapidly" with new software-as-a-service products and software platforms that will help the chipmaker better compete against rivals. With more than $100m in software revenue last year, this is a natural next step. During Intel's investor …
And anything that makes an accountant happy is a BAD thing.
When corporations started making billions invading privacy with cookies / data mining, when they began offering MS in the cloud for a monthly fee (while cutting on-prem functionality) and when state sponsored hackers began undermining everything, we should have stood up as one and said, "No, enough!" Instead, people gave up their privacy for emoji's, businesses paid MS so they could have cute animated GIF's in Teams and governments placed their own selfish needs above the people they are supposed to represent.
We, as a free society, have lost. The freedoms we signed away in one sided EULA and orders from secret courts are never coming back without stark measures. Democracies no longer exist as governments have stopped looking out for their citizens unless there are votes to be gained. Laws are broken daily by corrupt politicians / civil servants filling up their bank accounts and no one is punished. Greedy corporations sacrifice hundreds of human lives for a bigger profit margin for their shareholders while paying millions to large law firms to protect their reputations. GDPR fines to Google, multiple Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the 2008 real estate collapse caused by outright deception and multi-million dollar CEO payouts while their workers make minimum wage under draconian conditions. That's just the price of doing business.
We, as a species, have no right to go to space and inhabit other worlds until we clean up our act and start making personal responsibility mean something again. If the Boeing board had faced Felony jail time for the MAX deaths, airplane safety would improve dramatically as one example.
Corporations are recognized as "people" in the US so they can make political donations. Time for the board members to be treated as "people" in the eyes of the law. Lock up one crooked politician or corrupt CEO and the rest will fall in line very quickly.
No need to comment, really.......there's a lot of (negative) comment about a similar Nvidia initiative just a day or so ago, here:
- Link: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/10/nvidia_software_services/
I'm refitting the bathroom soon........I'll be needing a subscription for the new toilet door and my new flushing toilet.............
..........NOT!!!............
None of the software products mentioned in the article seem to be directly related to the chip business, which would seem to indicate that at some stage in the near future someone is going to pull the plug and refocus on the silicon business. Unless, Intel are making the first steps in getting out of the silicon business...
They used to be in the software business with a kernel and development tools. They dumped the line because of all the money they were making from PCs.
(Incidentally, the original Intel linker/locater had one property that didn't get carried over to the various copies of the package that came afterwards. You had to specify the symbols that each module or library would export, everything else in the library being invisible ('private' in modern parlance). )
RMX-86 remember it well...
The Intel ASM, Linker/Locator were quite powerful - they made the Unix GCC look quite primitive. But then all x86 C compilers had problems handling the x86 memory segmentation model.
The Intel linker had another property, it was multi-pass, so I could deliver a linked blob (with sanitised externals) to the project for others to link with their blobs.
"Platform Value Pull-Through" ... what a crock of shit!
Intel has a history of ginning up, and eventually dumping, sideline businesses. Remember the Intel microscope? (It had a digital camera which connected via USB to your Win95 PC.) Remember the Intel Big Ear (or whatever it was called) -- a kid's "spy" toy? Remember Intel motherboards?
To their credit, their motherboards and FORTRAN compiler were good.
Accounting and valuation.
Opex is seen as manageable and Capex as dangerous and "needed risk".
By moving the Capex to opex the ratios the investors look at improve, and the company is not only worth more, but the rating is better.
With better rating, financing is both easier and cheaper.
And it makes no sense.
>With better rating, financing is both easier and cheaper.
And then they whinge because they loaded themselves up with Opex costs and so can't cut prices to the same extent as the (foreign) competition who used Capex to improve efficiency and reduce Opex costs...
Seem to remember some industries where they stitched themselves up so well, that even if the workers were paid nothing, they still couldn't compete...
Because leasing software is more profitable than selling it. That's why every big corporation, IT or not, is opting for selling "services" and subscriptions rather than any sort of finished product and heavily marketing the "advantages" of you not owning the thing you need to use.
Of course, they promise all sorts of support on their brochure, but anyone who's ever had to call support knows damn well you're better off asking on reddit.
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