Whither Intel? Turn to almost any corner of the Web and you’ll find gloomy forecasts of doom for the company, or jeremiads detailing the chip maker’s failings and flaws. Only Microsoft seems to attract more derision and suspicion in the blogosphere.
Calm down, y’all. Intel’s become a very big company ($39B in sales and rising), and big-company problems take time. Let me give you some perspective. There was a time when things were really looking dire for Intel.
It was the early 1980s. Intel was reeling from the relentless competition coming from Japan, where the government was encouraging domestic chip makers to sell semiconductors in the US, particularly memory devices. Prices were below what it cost to make the chips, in order to gain market share. Intel was providing the microprocessors for the IBM Personal Computer and its “clones,” yet it was getting killed on the memory side of the business. IBM finally stepped in and made an equity investment of $250 million in Intel to demonstrate its confidence in the chip maker’s future.
In a recent interview with Electronic Engineering Times, Freescale Semiconductor CEO Michel Mayer expressed the opinion that the days of the semiconductor startup are over. Mayer said, “The opportunities for a niche company to be a Broadcom are gone.” When the conventional wisdom holds that something is “over,” the reality is that it’s never really over. No one could see any value in starting a new chip company to challenge Fairchild Semiconductor back in the day, but that’s when Intel and AMD got started, and Fairchild Semi became a shadow of itself. Before Intel became Intel and Microsoft became Microsoft, thanks to IBM, people were questioning the wisdom of starting a new chip company while the US semiconductor industry was under assault by Japanese chip makers, and that’s when stalwarts LSI Logic and Integrated Device Technology (IDT) were started.
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