John, thanks for the link. I like the contrast between the two CEOs.
AMD's Sanders can barely contain his emotions when he talks about Intel. "This is a fascist organization that uses intimidation of their customers and the rest of the infrastructure guys to make our lives extremely difficult," he says. "This is their 'cut off the air supply' strategy. No matter what they say, they want to be an out-and-out monopoly. If we're gone, there is no competition, and if you believe, as I do, that competition is the key to innovation, we'll lose that too."
Hold on, he's not finished yet [I love this line]. "There's another reason we're attacking their business model, and that is that the entire PC hardware industry, thanks to Intel, has become an unstable molecule. It's unreal, it's unbelievable, that a company is making as much money as they are when all their customers are suffering huge losses, and have delegated most of their R&D to them."
Grove's explanation for the missteps sounds a whole lot less geeky: "The past two years have been rough, no question, and there's a whole litany of factors, but there's one you probably haven't heard: The disappearance of our COO. When Craig got kicked upstairs he could no longer play that old role, and it took a while before people spread their attention, capabilities, power, influence, and competence into the vacuum he left behind. Only now have we gotten back to executing like we ought to." In other words, it was a human failure, not a design flaw.
All this helps explain why Barrett seemed such a promising successor: Like Grove, he is an engineer who has shown he can excel at the personal side of the business. That duality is reflected in the way he approaches his job as CEO. Barrett still logs thousands more miles each year than Andy Grove ever did, visiting customers and Intel facilities around the world. And he still occasionally holds what some Intel engineers call "prayer meetings" to inspire technology-development groups he thinks are falling behind. Says he: "If you or anyone at Intel asks me what keeps me awake at night, I'll say the same thing I've been saying for more than ten years: I worry about the internal execution of our product road maps. If we do that, we win. If we stumble there, we give the competition a chance."
Which one would you want running your company? <g>
wanna_bmw |
