| Hello everyone, Ian here. In the relentlessly futuristic world of tech, there's little room for nostalgia. Especially in the often brutal semiconductor sector, going backwards is usually inviting irrelevance—if not disaster. Last week, though, Intel Corp.'s board said it's bringing back Pat Gelsinger to run the company, replacing Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan. Gelsinger first went to work for the now 52-year-old chip giant when he was a teenager, and Intel was barely a decade old. He's rejoining the Silicon Valley icon after an absence of about 10 years while he ran software company VMware Inc. In his first rallying call to staff, Gelsinger noted that Intel had shaped his entire career. In a post on the company's website, he harked back to what he learned from its co-founders. Much of Wall Street's positive reaction to his appointment was because of his familiarity with the world's best-known chipmaker's technology and culture. But his outside experience at VMware may prove as big an asset. Gelsinger rejoins Intel at a time when its future dominance appears shaky. While he was away, Apple Inc., Google, Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and many of the largest buyers of chips have either started to supply themselves or look to other chipmakers. That trend itself is a throwback to when electronics giants such as Philips and Motorola made their own chips. It's also one more sign that the technology world is no longer waiting for the Santa Clara-based company to show up and tell them what's coming next. In recent years, the types of chips that are in demand have changed, thanks to the explosion of smartphones and the wide-scale deployment of artificial intelligence. The owners of large data centers intimately understand their workloads and have the money and knowhow to make their own components. When it comes to manufacturing—where Intel was once the runaway world leader—the company is now arguably years behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which is doing outsourced production for all of Intel's rivals and many of its customers. It's hard to overstate Intel's role in the history of modern computing. Even companies that are now many times its size in public market value were long dependent on Intel's pace of innovation as the cornerstone of advances in what they offer to the world. There are a lot of steps that go into making an Apple MacBook so attractive, or a Google search result fast and relevant, but underpinning those and many other advances has historically been a microprocessor from Intel. When Gelsinger started at the company, his mentor was co-founder Andy Grove. Grove was famous for creating an internal culture that focused on building up its own leaders and imbuing them with a relentless focus on intellectual honesty, as well as competitive ferocity. Anyone who's met Gelsinger knows he believes in that wholeheartedly. To bring the chipmaker into the future, Gelsinger's outside experience will be key. He'll also need to tap into Intel's famously paranoid culture of yore, and reestablish its reputation for running faster than anyone else. He'll have to do that in a way that suits a new audience of major buyers who believe they are the chip giant's peers in engineering and vision. They have more choices than ever, and they won't wait for Intel to catch up. —Ian King | 
Post a Comment