Ibexx,
From that same issue:
eb-mag.com
INDUSTRY LEADERS
PILLARS OF HIGH TECH
Towering over the industry, EB's pillars of 1999
Craig Barrett had some pretty big shoes to fill when he took over as Intel Corp., Santa Clara, chief executive in March 1998. His predecessor, current Chairman Andrew Grove, put the chip-making giant atop the PC world and secured its place as a technology powerhouse. Some might say that's hard to top, especially for the first Intel CEO who wasn't part of the company's founding in 1968. "[I get] two hours less sleep a night," Barrett jokes.
By all accounts, though, Barrett has filled Grove's shoes capably, and cobbled a few of his own. Barrett somehow managed to keep Intel's main microprocessor business thriving at a time when it was supposed to plummet. And he escorted the chip behemoth into the Internet Age by branching out into networking and communications businesses. Intel has plunged into what Barrett has called the "Internet Economy" by making a number of acquisitions and getting into such fields as Web hosting.
In short, Barrett is driving a $25 billion, 65,000-employee company to reinvent itself. "For a large company, they've moved remarkably fast," says David Wu, analyst with ABN Amro Bank N.V. in New York. Wu cautions that the jury is still out on whether Intel's moves will work.
It does appear to be the logical strategy, analysts say. Andrew Neff, analyst with Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. in New York, says Barrett needs to keep pushing Intel toward such ventures as making Internet appliances. "Now they've got segmented architectures. I think that's an important change," Neff says.
Barrett says that this new world order will bring significant changes in the way Intel does business. Intel will remain part of the so-called "WinTel" alliance with Microsoft Corp. But, as non-PC devices such as cell phones increasingly start hooking up to the Internet, the company will forge other important alliances as well.
"Clearly, the PC is not going away," he says. "The PC is still very much a Windows-type device. So the relationship with Microsoft is alive; it's well. There's still close cooperation between the two companies. But there are going to be other relationships that will be formed. The segmentation of the marketplace will require new partnerships, new allegiances, new strategic relationships."
There will be new ways in which the Intel CEO does business. While Grove spent more time closely following the day-to-day operations of the company, Barrett says Intel's branching into new businesses means he needs to take a more strategic view. That may mean that the company will lose a little of its tight focus.
"We're not managing a diverse conglomerate of businesses, because they're all interrelated," Barrett says. "But for any one person to get into as much detail as one could when we were just an x86 processor-based company, that would be very difficult. I have to stand a layer further removed. That automatically refocuses you on where the industry is going and on what the big strategies are, as opposed to what the bus speed needs to be on the next processor." |
