Firstly, the company's case is furiously reminiscent of Boeing's, in the sense that here too we find a dominant company in a duopoly situation - at the time, Intel could even be said to have a monopoly - and the holder of sovereign know-how losing its very raison d'être to exacerbated financial capitalism.

Like the aircraft manufacturer, Intel has spent far too many years obsessed with distributing dividends to its shareholders - even to the point of going dangerously into debt, certain that the future would resemble the past - rather than with the innovation and competitiveness of its products.

Such a sick desire to impress the financial markets could only lead to disaster. Sadly, this is an all-too-frequent corollary of our society of continuous and instantaneous communication - if not spectacle.

Secondly, in the long term, it is clearly the fate of all or almost all hyper-capitalist activities to go under, even when they appear to be operating from a position of strength. The only counter-example that springs to mind is that of the Canadian railroad operators.

In these columns, at the time of Pat Gelsinger's appointment as CEO, we pointed out the difficulty Intel would have not in creating shareholder value, but in not destroying it. Indeed, how to amortize $40 billion in capital expenditure per year - $25 billion in fixed assets and $15 billion in R&D - with stagnating sales and plummeting margins? The equation was almost impossible.

Thirdly, the famous "moats" or pseudo sustainable competitive advantages so vaunted by analysts and the financial communications of certain listed companies are in reality always more fragile than we think.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, it was hard to imagine a more unassailable competitive advantage than Intel's, since no one was in a position to challenge the group not only for its technological know-how, but even more so for the economies of scale made possible by the ubiquity of the famous "Intel Inside".

Without wishing to be overly catastrophic, such a chilling example could provide Visa and MasterCard shareholders with a vertigo-inducing meditation...