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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Milk who wrote (35933)	8/13/1998 10:04:00 AM
From: Kevin K. Spurway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572707

Re: Asia Milk, I'm sure you can find that boilerplate in the quarterly report of almost every single public company that does major business in Asia. It's a statement of the obvious designed to deter ambulance chasing lawyers. Kevin

To: Milk who wrote (35933)	8/14/1998 4:45:00 PM
From: Milk	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572707

Friday August 14 4:18 PM ET How Intel managed its way to domination By Margaret Kane, ZDNet When Albert Yu, vice president of Intel Corp.'s microprocessor products group sat down to write a book about the company's successes, people thought he would focus on the more mundane aspects of designing and building chips. But Yu instead chose to shine a spotlight on the management of Intel. His conclusion: The company owes its success less to technology and more to the way technology gets exploited to grow the business. Yu's book, "Creating the Digital Future: the secrets of consistent innovation at Intel" also explores how the company used some of its more unique management techniques -- such as "constructive confrontation" -- to motivate employees and build successful products. In an interview, Yu said that management is often one of the hardest things to master at a high-technology company. "To move people from technology to business -- those are big transitions," he said. "Engineering school teaches you about things, not people, which are totally different." In your face, pal Intel has a famously confrontational corporate culture. In the book Yu describes a culture where, at one time, employees who showed up later than 8:05 in the morning were required to sign in. As teams worked on projects, progress reports were posted on bulletin boards so that everyone could check their weekly status. Yu said that while the working environment may seem harsh to outsiders, the truth of the matter is more complex. "Constructive confrontation means that we confront issues aggressively and we solve problems aggressively," he said. "We don't attack people at all. If we have a difficult problem we try to solve the problem quickly. We try to surface problems quickly rather then hide them or something like that." Still, Yu added, "Intel is a place where people want to excel. It's not a place for people who just want to work 8 to 5." This work ethic has helped the chip colossus dominate the PC market. But Intel recently stumbled after failing to pick up on the growing popularity of sub-$1,000 systems. As a result, many PC makers have turned to competitors such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and National Semiconductor Corp.'s Cyrix. Intel finally released a special processor for the sub-$1,000 market, the Celeron, but the first version was not a big hit. A new version of the chip is set to be released later this month. "The below-$1,000 PC is nothing new ... there are probably more failed attempts in that region than anything else because it was not powerful enough," Yu said. "You can go all the way back to IBM's PC Jr. That didn't take off. The question is, when is it going to take off? The low-end is not a sure thing. We didn't jump in until it became very clear that there is a market there, and once it was clear, we jumped in very aggressively." The Internet has helped fuel the growth in the sub-$1,000 PC market, a trend Yu expects to also spur sales of more expensive computers. "The Web today is still very much text-oriented, just like the PC a few years ago was still very-much text-oriented," Yu said. To extensively use multimedia on the Web, "depends on what kind of computer you have."