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Monday, 04 April 2005 |
A New Brain For Intel
TIME
The last thing you would expect to hear Paul Otellini praising is an Apple
product. Otellini, 54, is the incoming CEO at Intel, the chipmaker that along
with Microsoft has ruled the PC world for much of the past 20 years and has
pushed the Macintosh platform to the fringes of market share. Yet when Otellini
outlines his company's new strategy, the first product
he mentions is Steve Jobs' best-selling MP3 player. "What is the iPod?" Otellini
asks, and his answer sounds strange from the mouth of a man with the
well-manicured looks of a successful accountant. "It's my music machine, man.
That's what you want. This," and here he gestures to a laptop across the
conference room at Intel headquarters, "is my content machine. That [desktop] PC
is my productivity machine. You have to start by thinking about the things
people want to do with computers and work backward."
That may sound like a simple enough statement, but it represents a profound
revolution in the way the Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker--long the powerhouse of
Silicon Valley--does business. Forty years ago this April, Intel co-founder
Gordon Moore predicted that given advances in transistor miniaturization,
computer processors should double in speed every 18 months. Not only did Moore's
law become the most trustworthy truism in technology, it was also the rock on
which all Intel marketing was founded. Why did you need a PC with an Intel
Pentium II processor? Because it was four times as fast as your poor outmoded
Pentium I. And so the product cycle continued.
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