Paul Otellini, former Intel chief executive, dies aged 66

Paul Otellini, who has died at the age of 66, cut an unusual figure at the helm of Intel, which was the world’s biggest chipmaker when he ran it.

A company built and run in its first 37 years by engineers, Intel’s culture was defined by the remorseless process improvements it made in one of the world’s toughest manufacturing industries.

Otellini, by contrast, was a product and marketing specialist who brought a new sensibility. If the results during his eight-year tenure were mixed, he played an important transitional role in shoring up Intel’s fortunes while it slowly reset its sights on a world beyond the personal computer.

Born in San Francisco in 1950, Otellini studied economics and gained an MBA before joining Intel’s finance division.

His career trajectory marked him out for a leadership role early on, with positions in charge of Intel’s relationship with IBM and acting as chief of staff to Andy Grove, the charismatic chief executive who had made the company a juggernaut.

The lack of an engineering background drew a sceptical reaction both inside and outside the company when he took over the top job in 2005.

But Otellini himself once said that it gave him an important vantage point when dealing with engineers enamoured with their latest technical achievements. The questions he asked them, as he told Santa Clara magazine, were: “Why would anyone want to buy it? What can they do with it?”

Otellini’s perspective made him “the relentless voice of the customer in a sea of engineers”, said Brian Krzanich, who succeeded him as chief executive in 2013.

But changing the culture, and business direction, of the company that defined the silicon revolution was not easy.

Low-power chip designs from the UK’s Arm Holdings had seeded a new industry of chip manufacturers producing for an array of devices beyond the PC market, where Intel’s main strength, packing more computing power into ever-smaller units, was less of an advantage.

Otellini himself had the chance to put Intel in pole position at the start of the smartphone era. The company’s processors were already inside BlackBerry’s first devices, and it was in the running for a place in the forthcoming iPhone.

As the head of an intensely disciplined company that ran to its own internal rhythms, Otellini later regretted that he had stuck to a by-the-book analysis of the data and not following his “gut” when he let the iPhone opportunity slip through his fingers.

A carefully spoken, deeply analytical executive, Otellini arrived in the CEO’s chair at a tumultuous time.

One of his first tasks was to cut nearly 20,000 jobs. His tenure was marked by a number of failed investments, as he struggled to expand the company’s role beyond its PC heritage.

These included a new high-speed wireless technology called WiMax, to an attempt to push Intel into the consumer video business. He also broke the mould with the acquisition of security company McAfee, though the new business was never fully integrated and was eventually spun off.

But if he struggled to redefine Intel for the post-PC world, Otellini succeeded in the most immediate challenge: maintaining the company’s profit machine and sustaining Moore’s Law, which has brought exponential advances in computing power.

He also cemented Intel’s dominance over smaller PC chip rival AMD, though at the cost of drawing a €1bn antitrust fine from the European Commission, at the time the largest it had imposed. Europe’s highest court last month agreed to a new review of that case, keeping alive Intel’s hopes of overturning the verdict.

Intel said that Otellini had died in his sleep at home on Monday. He leaves a wife, a son and a daughter.