Come Sayle Away

A lot of things have happened since my last post. I know it's been a while. I'm pretty sure my boss knows I'm the author of this blog, and has decided to discourage my blogging my burying me with work, travel, and coverage for him. With a long holiday vacation thrown in, I'm just now coming up for air.

The big news when I got back from vacation was that Bill Sayles had left Intel. It's significant inside IT because he was a VP, was visible, fairly well known, and owned most of the SAP re-platform work taking place. The announcement was typically vague. Given this, rumors abound about why he left or was forced out. They are all over the map, and any negative or unsavory idea you can imagine has been floated. I have no idea why he left, but experience tells me that the truth is far more mundane than people expect. Perhaps he got a better offer. Maybe he and JJ had a falling out about something and decided it was best to part ways. Maybe he took the G10 (and above) VSP package that was offered a couple of months back. I don't expect to ever know, and don't particularly want to. While I didn't know him well, he seemed to be a straight shooter who called things at face value and drove hard for results. He also seemed to be more of a pure IT guy than some other staff members, and I'm sorry to see him go.

I completely missed posting about Q3 earnings, and have only a few comments on Q4. My summary: the numbers were good, but not good enough. Wall Street cares about earnings relative to expectations - goodness is defined as hitting an expected goal. Doing extremely well and still missing the goal is perceived as under performing. The consensus seems to be that Intel had a good Q4, but missed on EPS by $0.02. So the outside view is not stellar. But the inside view seems pretty good. I certainly wish we'd hit the earnings forecast so stock would be moving up, but the numbers all seemed solid.

Our IT leaders descended on Santa Clara a couple of weeks ago for the annual IT Leadership Conference. Information about what happened there is sketchy at best, but I really haven't looked too hard for it. My boss has been pretty quiet about what happened there, but I expect some info to be passed down this week. He did tell me there are no plans for another IT layoff this year, but if I recall that's consistent with what JJ has already said to the masses.

Finally, in response to the comments about me and Jeff M. being the same person, my feelings on this are: believe whatever you want to believe. It's interesting that some of you smell a conspiracy. But have you guys considered that Jeff has no reason to post anonymously? Have you read his blog? And while the notion is flattering to me, have you read my this blog? I suppose Jeff could dumb down his writing somewhat, be more verbose, far less funny, and post very infrequently. But this fails in the way as most conspiracy theories do: it assumes that the would-be conspirators give a shit enough to scheme, plot, engineer, and execute something this elaborate. Do you have any idea how much energy would would take to try and impersonate someone else here while writing two other blogs? I barely have time to post as myself. Sorry guys, but the truth is I'm just another run-of-the-mill IT worker bee.

I'll address some comments and a few other items later this week.