Intel Can’t Win Mobile, But It Owns the Cloud—For Now
When Intel announced that it would lay off 12,000 workers in an effort to restructure itself for the post-PC age, there was one notable word missing from its spin-heavy press release: mobile.
The press release said that the chipmaker was cutting 11 percent of its global workforce in order to “accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices.” But that doesn’t mean smartphones—or, at least, it doesn’t seem to. The bit about “smart, connected computing devices” is a reference to the Internet of Things. Okay, that gawd awful buzz-phrase don’t really capture the full scope of what Intel is trying to do there (it’s not just Internet-connected thermostats). Either way, Intel really isn’t a PC company or a smartphone company. And since the Internet of Things doesn’t really exist, that makes Intel a cloud company.
