Intel and the Strategic Inflection Point

In the mid-1980s, Intel was a memory company watching the business that built its identity slip away. Japanese manufacturers had flooded the market with cheaper DRAM chips, margins were collapsing, and the entire engineering culture still believed, in its bones, that Intel was a memory company. Andy Grove and Gordon Moore could read the numbers. What they couldn't easily do was overcome the careers, the egos, and the history standing in the way. So Grove asked Moore one strange question.

This case is about acting on a fundamental shift in your business before the evidence becomes so overwhelming that the window has already closed. For founders and operators, it sharpens the hardest version of decision-making: telling the difference between something you keep doing because it's still the right bet, and something you keep doing only because you started it.