The long, painful downfall of Intel

Engineers once strode across Intel‘s Silicon Valley headquarters with pride. The semiconductor company they worked for had helped birth the region’s tech industry, sparked the personal computer revolution and turned the tiny transistor into the brains of everything from toasters to fighter jets.

Intel did so partly by following the business philosophy of its third employee, Andy Grove, who held top leadership positions from 1979 to 2005 and was CEO from 1987 to 1998. He built the company into the dominant supplier of chips used in most computers,…