<story><title>Steve Jobs and the Missing “Intel Inside” Sticker</title><url>http://kensegall.com/2017/06/steve-jobs-and-the-missing-intel-inside-sticker/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sblank</author><text>The Intel Inside campaign wasn&amp;#x27;t just a consumer branding strategy. First and foremost it was a predatory marketing campaign that turned into exclusionary behavior. PC firms that used Intel chips and put Intel Inside on their PC&amp;#x27;s were given funds to use in advertising and were reimbursed for &amp;quot;marketing expenses&amp;quot;. In reality these marketing funds were actually a subsidy&amp;#x2F;discount (some would say kickback) on Intel chips. As Intel&amp;#x27;s power grew they would only give the PC manufacturers rebates if they would buy 95% of their Microprocessors from Intel. If they used AMD or other microprocessors - all the Intel rebates would disappear. By the end of the 1990s, Intel had spent more than $7 billion on the Intel Inside campaign and had 2,700 PC firms locked up. By 2001 these rebates were running $1.5 billion a year.&lt;p&gt;Intel was sued in Japan (for offering money to NEC, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sony, and Hitachi,) in the EU (for paying German retailers to sell Intel PC&amp;#x27;s only) and in the U.S. for predatory (pricing), exclusionary behavior, and the abuse of a dominant position (HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Gateway and Hitachi.) The legal record is pretty clear that Intel used payments, marketing loyalty rebates and threats to persuade computer manufacturers, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP), to limit their use of AMD processors. U.S. antitrust authorities have focused on whether the loyalty rebates used by Intel were a predatory device in violation of the Sherman Act. The European Commission (EC) brought similar charges and imposed a 1.06 billion Euros fine on Intel for abuse of a dominant position.&lt;p&gt;The sum of these efforts not only killed competitors but it killed innovation in microprocessor design outside of Intel for decades.&lt;p&gt;Ironically Intel&amp;#x27;s lack of innovation in the 21st century is a direct result of its 20th century policy of being a monopolist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flomo</author><text>Not to disagree with your point about monopolism, but &amp;quot;Intel Inside&amp;quot; came about in that weird period of PC history where IBM had been dethroned, but nobody had taken charge. PC companies were manufacturing &amp;quot;clones&amp;quot; of increasingly outdated systems, and the pain-points were numerous and obvious. It really was a &amp;quot;unique branding opportunity&amp;quot; for someone to step-up and define the post-IBM PC market.&lt;p&gt;Which Intel did. They were largely the one who turned primitive PC ATs + 57 different hacks into the modern PC platform. APIC PCI USB etc. (AMD gets credit for 64-bit largely because Intel refused to do so.) &amp;quot;Intel Inside&amp;quot; wasn&amp;#x27;t just marketing kickbacks, it was a badly-needed standardization program.</text></comment>
<story><title>Steve Jobs and the Missing “Intel Inside” Sticker</title><url>http://kensegall.com/2017/06/steve-jobs-and-the-missing-intel-inside-sticker/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sblank</author><text>The Intel Inside campaign wasn&amp;#x27;t just a consumer branding strategy. First and foremost it was a predatory marketing campaign that turned into exclusionary behavior. PC firms that used Intel chips and put Intel Inside on their PC&amp;#x27;s were given funds to use in advertising and were reimbursed for &amp;quot;marketing expenses&amp;quot;. In reality these marketing funds were actually a subsidy&amp;#x2F;discount (some would say kickback) on Intel chips. As Intel&amp;#x27;s power grew they would only give the PC manufacturers rebates if they would buy 95% of their Microprocessors from Intel. If they used AMD or other microprocessors - all the Intel rebates would disappear. By the end of the 1990s, Intel had spent more than $7 billion on the Intel Inside campaign and had 2,700 PC firms locked up. By 2001 these rebates were running $1.5 billion a year.&lt;p&gt;Intel was sued in Japan (for offering money to NEC, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sony, and Hitachi,) in the EU (for paying German retailers to sell Intel PC&amp;#x27;s only) and in the U.S. for predatory (pricing), exclusionary behavior, and the abuse of a dominant position (HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Gateway and Hitachi.) The legal record is pretty clear that Intel used payments, marketing loyalty rebates and threats to persuade computer manufacturers, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP), to limit their use of AMD processors. U.S. antitrust authorities have focused on whether the loyalty rebates used by Intel were a predatory device in violation of the Sherman Act. The European Commission (EC) brought similar charges and imposed a 1.06 billion Euros fine on Intel for abuse of a dominant position.&lt;p&gt;The sum of these efforts not only killed competitors but it killed innovation in microprocessor design outside of Intel for decades.&lt;p&gt;Ironically Intel&amp;#x27;s lack of innovation in the 21st century is a direct result of its 20th century policy of being a monopolist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ykler</author><text>It seems to me there is nothing inherently anti-competitive about requiring people who buy your component to advertise that they are using it (or, a fortiori, with incentivizing them to do this with discounts).  But offering rebates to customers who by 95% of a certain kind of component from you does seem anti-competitive to me.  That should probably be illegal.</text></comment>