Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World's Most Powerful ChipCompany - Hardcover

Jackson, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052594141X ISBN 13: 9780525941415

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1997

Synopsis

An experienced business journalist presents the first detailed look inside the inner workings of Intel, a leading company in microchip technology, revealing its authoritarian corporate culture and the competitive tactics of its chairman, Andrew Grove. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Jackson, formerly on the staff of The Economist, now writes a weekly column on the Internet and the computer business for the international daily newspaper The Financial Times. After working as a foreign correspondent in Japan and Belgium, he now lives in California. Inside Intel is his third book.

Reviews

A lively, accessible, and informative overview of Intel Corp., the Silicon Valley phenomenon that bestrides the widening world of semiconductor devices like a colossus. With but minimal cooperation from the company, Financial Times columnist Jackson (The Next Battleground, 1992) was obliged to rely on interviews, court papers, and on-the-record material to piece together its story. He nonetheless makes a fine job of reconstructing the high-tech enterprise's history, from its 1968 founding by Robert Noyce (co-creator of the integrated circuit) and Gordon Moore through the present day, when Pentium series chips dominate the market for PC microprocessors. Along the way, the author details how Intel achieved and sustained a leadership position by means of technical innovation, painstaking attention to fabrication techniques (which now permit millions of active transistor elements to be deposited on substrates measured in microns), the capacity to commit billions of dollars to capital investment during good times and bad, and a willingness to play rough with key employees who defect, as well as potentially troublesome rivals. Under the focused direction of CEO Andrew Grove (a refugee from Communist Hungary whose managerial style is reflected in the title of his 1996 book, Only the Paranoid Survive), Jackson shows, the transnational company does not shy from using litigation to gain or retain a competitive edge. Nor, he notes, does Intel like to admit error, as attested to by its attempt to stonewall the 1994 disclosure that the first Pentium chips might make long-division mistakes once in every nine billion calculations. Even so, the secretive and authoritarian outfit continues to be immensely profitable. A first-rate anecdotal briefing on a consequential supplier of small wonders that are at the heart of a latter-day industrial revolution. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hard-driven CEO and chairman Grove has dominated Intel since shortly after its founding in 1968. He focused the company on setting goals and achieving results. As Jackson, a columnist for the Financial Times, points out in his excellent book, Grove was also largely responsible for Intel's arrogance toward customers, aggression toward competitors, and pettiness toward employees. Intel's success came from being on the cutting edge of semiconductor technology with innovative products like the DRAM, EPROM, and microprocessor. Nevertheless, lack of foresight lost Intel its memory-chip business, and only a last-minute marketing effort saved its dominant position in microprocessors. The author draws on interviews as well as published and unpublished sources to produce this well-written and -documented business and technical history. Highly recommended for all libraries as a window into one of the world's most important companies and its methods.?Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 052594141X
• ISBN 13: 9780525941415
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 424