Why intels Barett must stay

1. Each new strategic mistake he makes causes Intel investors to be that much more loyal or at least dogmatically defensive.

2. If Intel dropped another $300 billion in market cap, the "buyback" plan will consist of Intel investors paying $13/share for Intel to take their stock back.

3. Jerry Sanders is now having so much fun showing off Intel charts, he may never let Hector Ruiz become the CEO. Jerry's attitude while showing these charts can only be described as "giddy as a school girl."

4. Craig Barrett has less company spies than Andy Grove, whose motto was "Only the Suspicious of Your Own Employees Survive." Sure, communism worked fine until the growth of the internal rot exceeded that of the external expansion.

5. He is less likely to institute a program where 5% of Intel's upper management is required to be rated as "needs improving" by investors, which parallels a similar program that is foisted by upper management upon their lowly-born.

6. He is more likely to invite the lads at faceintel.com to a peace accord in Dublin.

7. AMD will be more apt to give subsidies to Mr. Barrett's salary in the form of bonuses, which is based on certain non-performance requirements.

8. Taiwanese chipmaker VIA loves him for giving up the chipset market. Purportedly, Intel's market share had to make an emergency landing in Taiwan after VIA's zippy PC-133 chipsets recklessly crashed into Intel's lumbering PC100 solution.

9. All those vice presidents, and they can't figure out that a CEO is strategic and a president looks after day-to-day operations. If he had tenure and were CEO only, he could say "Why don't we do this?" versus "Why on earth did we do that?" or "I don't like Jerry poking fun at us."

10. The CEO creates the strategy, the President executes the strategy. It is not as if Craig is incompetent, but rather he has taken on too much responsibility. (Competence understands its own limitations.) µ