Yep, that's a lot of the essence. I would point out a few things, though.

Unlike many other cases of a company getting a bad culture, Intel hasn't seen its marketshare destroyed. They still have time to turn things around. Even if things go in a very bad direction, they could become a fabless company like AMD and compete for TSMC's capacity on equal terms with AMD.

If you look at a company like Yahoo, Google had already become dominant when it was trying to turn itself around. AMD hasn't even hit a third of the market.

Not only that, but it's probable that AMD isn't capable of becoming even 50% of the market due to capacity constraints. If AMD can make 25-30% of the market's processors and no more due to capacity constraints, even if Intel processors are inferior, they're still going to be the bulk of sales. By contrast, Google had basically infinite capacity to dominate search, Facebook had basically infinite capacity to crowd out MySpace and other rivals, etc. The point is that Intel has a lot more runway to turn itself around if it's essentially guaranteed 70% of the market.

In some ways, this resembles the Boeing/Airbus situation. While Boeing has been in a bad place recently, Airbus can't take advantage of it. That gives Boeing a long time to change its trajectory and is probably why Airbus is only worth around 15% more than Boeing. Even if airlines want to buy Airbus planes, they can't. Likewise, even if OEMs and datacenters want to buy AMD chips, maybe they can't because AMD doesn't have the capacity to make them.

In some cases, you need to rapidly change the culture and direction of a company because you're quickly dying. In Intel's case, it seems likely that they could waddle along for a long time if AMD isn't able to quickly grab marketshare. I think it's easier to gradually change the culture over a longer period of time if you have the ability to stave off collapse in the meantime.

For example, maybe we'll look back on Intel in a decade and say "yea, the change started around 2020 when Intel realized it had fallen behind. It continued to fall behind while it tried to correct things, but then turned a corner and in 2025 they'd regained the fab crown." Are we already close to that culture change showing up in the public view?

I just think I don't know enough about the industry to really know. Maybe someone would say "Intel has already done the culture change and we've seen that in things like Intel 4 and you're really going to notice it in 2025 and 2026 with Intel beating TSMC to High NA EUV." Maybe someone would say "No, intel hasn't changed its culture and you can see that Intel 4 is a niche where they can't even make enough volume to put out a server product with it." Or maybe Intel is focused on the more medium-term with 18A and not wanting to waste resources on a less-than-stellar interim process.

I guess my question isn't just whether Intel is capable of changing its culture, but whether that's already happened. The public perception is a lagging indicator. Most of the public didn't have a bad perception of Boeing 1996-2017. We only recognized the problems in hindsight. Likewise, we recognized Intel's shortcomings in hindsight. We won't recognize whether Intel has changed for years after it has already changed.

So, has Intel's culture already changed (and we're going to see some pretty awesome stuff from them in 2025 and 2026) or has Intel been on the same path to mediocrity for the past 4 years (and they've just gotten better at press releases announcing that they'll be better soon)?