Thus, in Shakespeare’s words, did English King Henry V challenge his soldiers to carry on against rival French defenders of Harfleur.
As many in business and finance know, success is not for all. Failure and bankruptcy also mark the road forward for capitalism. Creative destruction paves the way of progress and higher standards of living, said Joseph Schumpeter. Clayton Christensen and the Harvard Business School wrote of the “innovators dilemma.”
Today, the once mighty company, creator of so much wealth and progress with its CPU chips to run computers, Intel is no longer just steaming along astride the waves of time and fortune.
The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims reported on January 4-5, 2025:
“You may think you know how much Intel is struggling, but the reality is worse.
The once-mighty American innovation powerhouse is losing market share in multiple areas that are critical to its profitability …
One flashing warning sign: In the latest quarter reported by both companies, Intel’s perennial also-ran, AMD, actually eclipsed Intel’s revenue for chips that go into data centers. This is a stunning reversal: In 2022, Intel’s data-center revenue was three times that of AMD.
… more and more of the chips that go into data centers are GPUs, short for graphics processing units and Intel has minuscule market share of these high-end chips. GPUs are used for training and delivering AI.
By focusing on the all-important metric of performance per unit of energy pumped into their chips, AMD went from almost no market share in servers to its current ascendant position, says AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster. As data centers become ever more rapacious for energy, this emphasis on efficiency has become a key advantage for AMD. …
This situation looks likely to get worse and quickly. Many of the companies spending the most on building out new data centers are switching to chips that have nothing to do with Intel’s proprietary architecture, known as x86 and are instead using a combination of a competing architecture from ARM and their own custom chip designs.”
Under the natural law of markets, what has no customers cannot be sold, no matter how nice, well-meaning and deserving the producer or the seller may be. Markets are not charities. As Adam Smith noticed, they match self-interest with self-interest.
But not every judgment about one’s self-interest is optimal. People can be and often are short-sighted about what is best for them. Some people can even be self-destructive or have no confidence in their agency to do good and right.
Thus, for me, finding the balance that makes a market transaction or capitalism, in general, moral, is a constant challenge for us all.