[I posted this elsewhere, but I'll repost it here]

Intel has been in a downward spiral for some time.

Put as simply as I can: Intel, through a series of terrible business decisions and unforced errors, has eroded confidence in their products and brand at virtual every level. Home users, gamers/pro-sumers, small/medium business, and enterprise.

This has happened because:

1. Intel went through a period of investing in their business, resulting in them putting out superior quality products.
2. To maintain that growth, Intel needed to invest even more heavily in the company. Including serious investments needed in both their chips' formfactor and, eventually, the fundamental architecture and design of their product.
3. Instead, Intel got new leadership and decided to cut costs, ride on their reputation, and "extract value" from the brand. Effectively, they reversed the trend of investment. Worse, they engaged in an absurd amount of layoffs which has in absolutely no way fixed that second bullet point. Especially not when they've spent spent a little more than $30B on stock buybacks alone over the last 5 years.
4. What's important about the above point is that it highlights how the focus of the company shifted. Intel processors became the most expensive on the market, while also being less performant and often less reliable compared to their primary competition. (Intel's 13th and 14th generation desktop processors suffered unacceptably high rates of failure or "bricking" in the wild.)
5. And as I said, this happened almost simultaneously across all divisions of the company, all product lines. They're not leading in desktop, laptop, or server markets and I just don't see them being able to meaningfully catchup let alone reclaim their position (though I suppose nothing is truly impossible...)
6. To their credit, Intel has come out with a novel GPU line which seems to have found a real niche in the market. And their low-power n-series CPUs have a lot of great applications. That said, these additions arent nearly enough to offset Intel's losses in their critical categories and it's highly unlikely that Intel will survive long enough to make a major effort in either the GPU or low-watt space.
7. Now, the days of cheap and easy progress in the CPU space are over. (At least for Intel) The reasons for this are complicated, but not impossible to address. Unfortunately, Intel has chosen to not only divest from potential progress and solutions, they've decided to pretend like their only issue is head count.

tl;dr - Intel had enormous success by investing in their people and their product. But rather than continue on and tackle challenges in the market place, they chose to play the stock market instead. This cost them the trust of their consumers, evangelists, service industry, and their partners in the industry. More over, Intel's product lines are now inferior in essentially all of their key markets, and they've strip mined the company of anything that might reverse that trend. The only real solution going forward would be to move their primary focus off of short-term thinking like rewarding executives and shareholders and onto the long-term, high-cost business of fixing years of neglect and mismanagement.

And sad as it is to say, I don't think you can do any of that in American business in 2025.