Opinion Intel’s loss

Andrew Grove

Andy Grove, who died on Monday, was mistakenly celebrated as a founder of Intel, but he did take a crucial call which changed the future of both the company and Silicon Valley. He sniffed out what he called a “strategic inflection point”, the moment at which the old withers away and disruptive technologies are born. In the 1970s, he turned his company away from manufacturing RAM chips, a rapidly saturating sector, and embraced the silicon of the future — the microprocessor. He’s also believed to have prevailed upon IBM to ship its machines only with Intel inside. That deal was the beginning of a global consolidation which accelerated when another would-be giant plugged into Big Blue in 1980 — Microsoft was contracted to produce an operating system for IBM’s line of PCs, and it spun it off as MS-DOS. When Windows followed, all the ingredients for the Wintel revolution in desktop and home computing were in place, and the world began to change rapidly and unpredictably.

The passing of Grove coincides with another inflection point in the digital economy. The accent of computing has shifted from desktops to mobiles and the cloud. We carry enormously powerful internet-connected computers in our pockets. We call them phones only because they happen to be capable of making calls. Among operating systems, Microsoft is continually ceding space to Android, Mac OSX, Linux and embedded systems. The IBM PC became a Chinese product after Lenovo bought it over. And in the microprocessor space, Intel’s pre-eminence has been eroded by AMD, ARM and other architectures.

Advertisement

A revolutionary manager and engineer, Grove was also a fine teacher and mentor, who famously believed that “only the paranoid survive”. Indeed, he set the stage for an era in which technologies and the corporations which make them have only one certainty — change.