alt Hacker NewsThey 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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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.
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.
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.