In a new Fortune magazine feature, Geoff Colvin writes that Intel’s operating problems have led it to the brink of extinction, requiring cash infusions from the federal government and tech companies that buy its chips.
If the engineers at America’s largest and most important semiconductor company could time-travel to a less complicated era, they might choose 1995, when Intel’s catchy sonic logo was still on the airwaves, and Andy Grove was still CEO.
Fortune published a cover story that year about the iconic third CEO of Intel. “Why Andy Grove Can’t Stop,” by Brent Schlender, was accompanied by a series of stop-motion animation-like photos of the late CEO in a white button-down with a dark sweater tossed casually around his shoulders. In every frame, the smiling, diminutive Grove is in a slightly different position: a man in constant motion, and a leader whose famous paranoia may have prevented Intel from losing its edge.
Intel was then the world’s dominant semiconductor company, and 80% of the world’s PCs had “Intel inside,” as its slogan said. Fortune attributed much of this success to the company’s chief executive: “Since Grove became CEO in 1987, Intel’s revenues have grown nearly sixfold, to $11.5 billion last year, and the chipmaker has leaped from tenth place in its industry to a Herculean No. 1,” Schlender explained. But Grove, we learn, remained characteristically worried.
Grove had figured out that personal computers would soon serve as tools for all forms of communication and entertainment, but PC makers were not taking full advantage of Intel’s powerful chips. So Grove had tasked a group of employees with finding applications for Intel’s Pentium products.
Schlender’s piece captured in amber a pivotal point in tech’s ascendence: the moment when computing came home. “The new power users of computers aren’t techies at all,” the article explained. “They’re U.S. consumers, who…last year spent more on PCs than on TVs.”
Schlender also described some of the “cool stuff” that Intel was prototyping, like “desktop videoconferencing gear for your PC, [and] a cable modem that will let PC users tap the Internet or online services via their cable TV lines and download data 1,000 times as fast as via the telephone.”
After arriving in New York City as a refugee fleeing unrest in Hungary in the 1950s, the young Grove studied chemical engineering at City College in New York, working summers as a busboy in the Catskills, before travelling west, newly married, to pursue a PhD at UC Berkeley, far from New York’s then-punishing winters.
In California, he became both a singular force and an archetype: an immigrant tech leader who would help build and define Silicon Valley and America’s future. Today, another immigrant Intel CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, is at the center of an effort to safeguard the American company—and crucial industry for national security—that Grove played such a key role in creating.
