Ashraf, I'm an older guy and have been at this since the 1970's.
I appreciate your experience. The perspective of a seasoned investor is always appreciated...even if you're hurling a few rocks at me along with it ;-)
(1) Ballmer's brilliant Win 8
Don't even get me started...fully agree with you. Window 8 is uncomfortable for most users and, frankly, it's a worse desktop OS than Win7/MacOS and it's an inferior tablet OS to Android. Fail.
That Intel CAN maintain $52 +- 2 bil/year in this environment is amazing testimony to its robustness.
Yes, that's why Intel is trading at ~14x TTM EPs and not 10-12x :-)
Smartphone sales are saturating with migration to commodity phones.
A world where phones are commodity works great for Intel, which is a component supplier. The less margin there is in the actual device, the less incentive there is for device makers to spend the $$$ building their own chips.
It is clear that the shortafalls in DCG, and other less than progosticated results trace to this general malaise in the economy.
Sure! But you understand that in the markets that Intel plays in today, Intel executes WELL. As in, DAMN WELL. This is why the poor execution in mobile is so puzzling to me. If they can build 18-core Broadwell Xeons on a crazy 14nm process (that they designed themselves), why is building a flipping cell phone chip so hard?!