The moment when Intel lost mobile happened around 2008, when it gave up on producing low-power chipset for phones and refocused on Atom SoC and netbooks
Disruption is simple to say but there many factors at play. Disruption is never one feature, but a full set of assumptions that go into a business. Tweets: @marypcbuk , @gassee , @bradsilverberg , @stevesi , @stevesi , @stevesi , and @stevesi Tweets: Mary Branscombe / @marypcbuk : I've heard so many people at Microsoft and Apple say the same as @stevesi-Intel delivered things that (Itanium, Atom especially) weren't useful to them, while making what they did need harder (eg 5 instructions to encrypt or decrypt not 1); real mismatch http://medium.learningbyshipping.com/ ... http://twitter.com/... Jean-Louis Gassée / @gassee : Terrific thread. So many missed opportunities. I'd love to know how Intel fell behind (blind?) in process tech. One ex-Intel person told me their competitive analysis group had no idea Apple was about to ship a 64bit A7 chip... Brad Silverberg / @bradsilverberg : This is truly wonderful, Steven. Lots of memories - not all good ones :). Don't forget NSP - Intel's effort to integrate shitty DSP, launched just before Win95 and incompatible with Win95. This article could be the outline of the Real Wintel book. Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : The “moment” when Intel gave up on mobile was when it turned the investment that wasn't quite yielding success in phones into a new “low cost PC” c. 2008. In other words the way to compete with the nascent world of mobile, was with a really under-powered PC. Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : As you can imagine the early success of netbooks (millions sold) boosted everyone's view of PCs (because 40M units is hard to miss). And brought a sense of “victory”. But of course this wasn't going to stop the march of mobile phones let alone the MacBook Air. Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : Then all of this really came to head with mobile—tablets in particular. Intel long working on a low-power chipset for feature phones. This wasn't coming together well. It seemed their heart wasn't in it. Much of the work was far removed from HQ and seemed like a side project. Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : One theory might be that their focus of “one fab->one chip” (not literally but close) just made keeping up impossible when compared to the dynamic nature of TMSC. Though multiple suppliers didn't help PowerPC. Having many customers/competing brings some agility.