Tim,
There's more to the discussion in the interview, but this is the essential bit:
If Intel hadn't made the transition in 1985, it might have died. Describe the risk now.
Stagnation. Lack of growth. Being restricted to a market that's further along the S curve than the communications market; a market that in many segments is more of a replacement market than a new penetration market. The risk then is that the scrappiness of the company would go away, the vitality would go away. When there is an opportunity that you can pursue, if you choose not to pursue it you are choosing a different corporate persona. It is entirely possible that the microprocessor business will not have a satisfactory growth rate in the years to come. We could accept that, we could choose to be a 10-percent-a-year company, we could adjust our spending and concentrate on being a very good 10-percent-a-year company. But we would not be the same Intel anymore.
I was wrong to say "Intel is betting on comm-chips for its future corporate growth" -- I should have said "to sustain the growth rate that the stock price implies". The market lets your earnings sag for a while, but eventually cashes in -- see T, LU, and probably MSFT in a few years.
Intel, interestingly enough, made many of Ovshinsky's device in the late 60s and early 70s. (As with Reticon's CCDs and Carver Mead's VLSI chips, a few years later.)
Paul mentioned this a few months ago when I first brought up the subject of OUM. (Gordon Moore was a co-author on one of Stan's early papers -- it's taken a while for amorphous semiconductors to catch up to silicon.) OUM is based on the same phase-change technology that is the basis of rewritable optical disks. In fact, for now, they are using the same chalcogenide targets for the OUM wafers as are used for the optical disks.
wily |
