Grove and Moore asked what a new CEO would do, then exited DRAM

Intel introduced the DRAM memory chip in 1970 and built the company's early identity and revenue around it. Through the early 1980s, Japanese manufacturers systematically took the business away: they built large, modern factories with heavy capital investment, matched Intel's quality, and — according to an internal sales memo Grove later described — instructed their salespeople to undercut Intel's price by a further 10% wherever they found it, however low Intel had already gone. By 1985, falling prices, slumping demand, and a supply glut had made the DRAM market structurally unprofitable for I

Inside the company, the response for years had been to keep fighting for the memory business rather than question whether Intel should still be in it — the emotional pull of defending the product the company had invented and built its identity around made an exit unthinkable to discuss directly. By the time senior leadership formally reckoned with the decision, middle managers had already quietly begun reallocating factory capacity away from memory toward the more profitable microprocessor line on their own, without waiting for a top-down strategy.