User:Schol-r-lea/The Shoehorn Parable
N.B.: This is one of a group of forum posts extracted so that the information in them can be re-worked into a less confrontational, more informational set of wiki pages. They are here only temporarily.
Imagine that you own a company which makes making shoe horns. You hear that some people are trying to make knives out of your shoehorns, which just seems weird to you, and so you stop taking orders from the weirdos. You are just getting things started for a new business line in selling televisions, and figure that the new model of shoehorns will last just long enough to pay for that re-tooling, when some guys walk into the factory with a 50-star general following them. One of these guys is one you know who has been making knives out of your shoehorns, while the other one is rolling his eyes and is frantically trying to convince the general that he is making a mistake. The general goes up to you and says, "I need a million of these bayonets you are making by next week".
You might ask him what he is talking about, but he points to a shoehorn, and the knife guy hands you a suitcase full of money with an enthusiastic gleam in his eyes. When you tell him you don't make bayonets, and that those are shoehorns, the general insists that these are perfect for his needs.
OK, you think, we can sell the shoehorns to them, its obvious that something crazy is going on but since I can't seem to talk this general out of it, I might as well get the money.
A few months pass, and you keep getting more orders for 'bayonets'. Meanwhile, the television project isn't going well, and you're thinking you might need to close the factory entirely, or at least focus on cheaper shoehorns again. Then, out of nowhere, government officials from a dozen countries start showing up with duffel bags full of cash, demanding that you sell them bayonets. Would you turn down that sort of money, just at the point when your company is about to tank?
This is basically what happened to Intel. They never wanted to be in the home computer market; they were making embedded systems chips with an eye on the emerging workstation market. The 8086 was something they threw together to squeeze another year or two out of the 8080 line until their 'real' products, the iAPX 432 workstation CPU and the 8051 SBC controller, were ready. They were blindsided by the PC market, but it was roaring just at a time when Intel's big gamble in the 432 was falling apart. That left them with a product line they didn't want, but couldn't afford to leave.
The engineering is not even a factor in the story. What mattered was that IBM laid down the law about home computers, just as companies like Osborne and Proc Tech were dying of terrible management, and everyone still in the game figured that you couldn't lose money by copying what The Empire was doing. Intel could have been selling abaci, but if IBM were using them, then everyone bought their abacus from Intel.
Korona's (rather apt) reply: That is the history, but today Intel's shoehorns are no longer made of wood or plastic but instead of carbon fiber reinforced titanium with lightsabers attached to both sides. You can still use them go get your shoes on (because some of your clients are actually doing this) but their primary function is providing the best bayonet available. Instead of trying to make new "proper" bayonets from scratch it's much cheaper and more reliable to just keep using those shoehorns. And even if somebody did actually try to manufacture proper bayonets there is a high chance that he will implement some design decision that renders the proper bayonets worse than the shoehorns.
My response: OK, that's very true. As much as I hate the architecture, I can't disagree that for what people want out of them - that is to say, performance and lots of it - they are the best. I may be wistful about what might have been, but I still use an i5 laptop myself.
