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Past Symposium/ITxpo
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Barrett: Technology Demand Will Continue to Grow For at Least a Decade Wednesday, 9 October 2002 View the Webcast Intel CEO Craig Barrett began his Mastermind Interview at Symposium/ITxpo 2002 on Tuesday morning by remembering one of his company's worst moments. In response to the session's opening question, "What is the secret of Intel's success?" posed by Gartner Vice President and Research Fellow Jackie Fenn and Gartner General Vice President and Research Fellow Martin Reynolds, Mr. Barrett recalled Intel's release of its first Pentium processor, which had a computational flaw. "I sometimes hearken back to the big learning experience we had about standing behind your brand. About 1995 or so, we introduced the first Pentium processor, and it didn't quite multiply and divide 32-bit numbers accurately," Mr. Barrett said. "It did pretty good to about the ninth decimal point, but some of you were worried beyond that." "We took the classic engineering attitude: 'Who cares what happens beyond the ninth decimal point, most computations don't go there.' Mr. Barrett said this led Intel's designers to think the flaw was only an issue of engineering significance. "That was absolutely the wrong attitude to take," he said. "If you have a brand or product, and the customer believes in your product, you stand behind your product. Then if your product doesn't work as advertised, you just don't think about it. In that case we quickly realized we had to replace those products. That leads forward to today, when I think we're probably still leading the way in terms of telling our customers errata and specification changes on a real-time basis associated with our products." On the subject of investing in the future, Mr. Reynolds mentioned a statement at the Mastermind Interview that preceded Mr. Barrett's, when Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said that HP expects to invest US$900 million in printers. "Nine hundred million would last us about 45 days," Mr. Barrett quipped. "That's not demeaning to Carly, because in the printer business $900 million is a lot of money. Last year and this year, our capital budget combined was somewhere in the $12 billion to $13 billion dollar range…You have to invest to stay at the leadership edge." "We've been betting on the future of this business for the last 20 years," he continued. "You build new factories in anticipation of products that haven't been designed yet. You're always betting one to two to three years out." Mr. Reynolds asked if there was anything that would make Intel "decide not to place that bet." "The unique thing about technology is that it does not recognize economic recession," Mr. Barrett replied. "Moore's law has been around for 45 years and it's good for another 15 years or so with the silicon technology we have today. We drive ourselves to be the steward of Moore's law, to really make it happen." "I'm a firm believer that just as technology is not going to slow down, it's not going to slow down in the marketplace," he said. "There's going to be a continuing demand for new and greater capability, whether it's in processors, memory or communications chips…The applications will be there. The customer demand will be there. I don't want to say that these extrapolate forever, but I don't see any slowing down in the near term or in the next five-to-10-year period." Mr. Barrett said one of the most important recent innovations for Intel has been its ability, during the last two years, to take sales information about its products and "realign our factory network almost overnight." "It takes about three days," he said, "but under the old pencil-and-paper routine it was taking us, effectively, 45 days to reload our factories in response to the instantaneous demand." Mr. Barrett said his ultimate aim was to cut cycle times even further, to 24 hours. "This is actually a key example of what Gartner describes as the real-time enterprise," Mr. Reynolds observed. Michael Calvert Gartner Staff |
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