There’s so much talking about these days about the European Commission awarding a multi-million dollar fine to Intel for having conducted monopolistic and fraudolent practices through the years 2002-2005, going from selling it’s cpu’s under production cost to forcing coercively OEMs to buy it’s products instead of AMD’s, convincing customers with threatening marketing funds cuts. I read the full argomentation, a 48+ page document, and it really makes sense if I recall everything that happened during those years. Shops were full of Intel-based PCs, resellers where only offering Intel CPUs and when you asked for a different CPU, they looked at you in awe, and said that they didn’t sell anything that was not Intel, since it was better, more reliable, more powerful, nd of course more….. expensive. But this they never said!

Being the nice chap that I am, I will not once more bore you with details about the judgement, letting you the chance to prove your google skills and find them yourself. I will only say that I am pretty astonished tofind demontrated by an european court what everything always new but was afraid to even talk about at product meetings.

I was even more astonished to find out that similar judgements were reached twice in the past, by the Japanese equivalent organization. 3 judgements in a row stating that Intel has acted in a unlawful manner against customers and clients, benefiting from the resulting impossibility of AMD to come to market at competitive prices or with competitive products.

I was never really keen to follow such judgements in a formal way, in the sense that I was convinced that whatever the European Commission would have found, it would have been easily rejected and counterattacked by big old Intel.

Boy, I was wrong. Even if they appeal, the image is broken, the marketing guys will never be able to fix such a massive defeat. And what’s more, AMD is scoring high lately.

On the CPU side, they are coming out with wonderful products, that outperform Intel’s counterparts both in performance, and what’s a consolidated tradition, in price. They recently sponsored a series of world overclockig records that helped making the brand be talked aout even in the most traditionalists of the websites. And all this, of course, has been done to push sales as much as they can, taing the chance that everybody is talking rubbish about Intel’s behaviour.

Not that AMD is an angel when it comes to business. Of course, they must have their skeletons in the closet to deal with. Managerial errors like the overpriced acquisition of ATI and some other “not so clear” things must weigh a lot over AMD’s shoulders. But even so, the company has managed to make a fuss around it showing the good things all around. And not shooting on the red cross and bashing Intel. Or if they did, they did it in respect of a hit competitor. Nice one, guys.

This is  clear demonstration of pure marketing skills: don’t bash the competitor, drive the customer’s attention to something as irrelevant as an overclock record, push in the market a good product using such record news as much as you can, and cash in with discrete video cards that sell like peanuts since they perform fairly well and don’t cost like an arm and a leg.

Intel should learn from AMD this time, I think. They should revise their marketing campaign, focusing a little bit more on pure performance competition and leaving aside for some time their “glorious past” as no.1 chip manufcturers, and make products that run for the money.

Living in Germany I lately had the chance to assist to some TV commercials of Intel, where they made the co-inventor of USB Mr.Ajay Bhatt, act like a rockstar entering the Intel’s cafeteria at a very slow pace while all the other employers where pointing at him and even fainting (the girls).

The motto of the commercial? “Our rockstars aren’t like your rock stars.” A piece of art. The campaign is having a lot of success. And here you have your share of it:

Intel Sponsors fo Tomorrow TV ad campaign

Btw, the person showed in the video is not the actual Ajay Bhatt, it’s an actor…