The Next Next Common Sense
to remember the dark days at Intel - days that reflect multiple roles and their conflicts as much as does Lisa’s story above. Intel was a memory company. That’s right, memory, the cheap $1 to $3 per Mb chips you now stuff into your computers 64Mb at a time. The founders of Intel (Moore and Noyce, Grove came later) were convinced that there was a market in replacing expensive mainframe magnetic core memory with cheaper semiconductor memory. And they were right. So right, that Asian factories did the same and nearly destroyed the company. In a commodity market, those with the lowest costs win, and Intel did not have the lowest costs. Noyce and Moore were noticeably luckier than Lisa, because the com- pany had many other product lines that had been overlooked. Senior management may have seen it as a memory company, Wall Street may have seen it as a memory company, but Intel was more than that. It made processors as well as memory. Processors in the early 1980s were not what we think of today. Volume was much lower and there was competition. Intel had the 8086 and the 80286, but Motorola had faster RISC chips and Apple was still a big thing. But, even more importantly, Andy Grove saw that the microprocessor was not a commodity. The skills of Intel’s workforce could be used to produce a money-losing commodity (DRAM memory) or a not-so-sure product, the specialized microprocessor. Grove made his choice and we all are living with the results. (The machine we typed this book on proudly says “Intel Inside.”) Intel was rescued by its own multisidedness. Contrast this with Zenith (yes, Zenith was once in the memory market too). This pattern of companies discovering their multisidedness con- tinues in the contemporary business landscape. Consider how Adobe transformed from a company focused on desktop publishing software to a provider of creative cloud services, or how Microsoft evolved from a Windows-centric software company to a cloud computing and productiv- ity platform. In each case, the company’s salvation lay in recognizing that it occupied multiple roles in its ecosystem—roles that could be empha- sized or de-emphasized as market conditions changed.
127
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease