Good Jobs quote, IBC. As I was reading it I was thinking, gee the ratio of best to average in physics is more like 100:1. Then I saw the punchline...same phenomenon in software engineering, evidently. I am not sure what causes this phenomenon..I think it is a kind of "flocking behavior" where the slightly weaker follows the leader and leads to a cascade amplification of the leader's impact. Then you have an Albert Einstein, who somehow is anomalous and is 10^6:1 more significant in impact. That's what happens when the circumstances are just right for a major breakthrough, and a 100:1 guy happens to be in the right place. In fact, Jobs himself may have been in a similar situation, but I still think Apple is all about style, less so technology...though you might argue smartphones are certainly driving new types of technology...eg. long battery life, performance, etc.......
....and this brings me to the Ashraf debate: I place a 100:1 premium (no, maybe a 10^4:1 premium) on the ability to make 14nm chips viz the ability to make a big SoC. The SoC will follow, for whatever application, but the 14nm is the foundational enabling technology. Now, it is possible that Intel will fail to leverage this advantage enough to make a 100:1 impact on the chipoplex. But I doubt that. The market will help them shape it. Smartphones will not be the leading application in a decade..rather ultra smart IoT (industrial things) will be, and with them, ultra efficient servers. The sky is blue for a well run Intel.
Admittedly, the view out the rear window of the Perlmutter-Ottelini era is now tarnished...we see the consequences of that exclusionary didactic (and in Perlmutter's case, something less than excellence)...but it did set the stage for the descent to atomic dimension transistors...and that will be the reason Intel again dominates the chipoplex, indeed, the universe of IoT, etc.
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