Chipmaker Intel just announced that CEO Paul Otellini, who has been on the job for eight years, will be retiring in May. A successor has not been named.
People are going to wonder if Intel’s board is forcing Otellini out. They’ll point to Intel’s mandatory retirement age of 65. Otellini is only 62, and his predecessor Craig Barrett retired from the CEO job at 65 or 66. But apparently there’s no hard-and-fast rule at Intel. The legendary Andy Grove, the company’s third employee, served as its CEO from 1987 until 1997, retiring closer to age 61.
But the bigger problems stem from the emergence of a fundamentally new computing environment over the last five years. When Otellini was promoted into the CEO job in 2005, Intel essentially set much of the computing industry’s agenda.
