Mike was at HP in the 70s, and he's now done some twenty books, so writing clearly comes easily to this man, as does a ready wit and urbanity that is refreshing to see in a public setting. He is an unabashed enthusiast for his topics, no question about that, and he is judicious in selecting the pieces to illumine his point of view. Makes for delicious reading in the main.
Reviews, from the publisher, are laudatory, even puffery. But I found one that was more balanced, that might be worth including here, since we tend at InnovaScapes to fret about accuracy of the historical record. Here it is, with highlighting:
Book review: ‘The Intel
Trinity,’ on the men who built Intel, by Michael S. Malone
By Marcus Brauchli July 18, 2014, Washington
Post
Marcus Brauchli is a former executive editor of The Washington
Post and managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.
In journalist Michael S. Malone’s telling, the world’s
most important company is audaciously innovative, viciously competitive and
boundlessly visionary, leaping from success to success as it upends and
reshapes industries. If you are 30 or younger, though, you may have trouble
guessing this particular technology company’s identity. At the barricades of
the mobile revolution, where cellphones and tablets inspire the masses, its
name is seldom mentioned. The
do-no-wrong industrial insurgent that Malone idolizes in his new Silicon Valley
corporate history largely missed out on those movements.
I know this because, while reading Malone’s lively if frequently hyperbolic
“The Intel Trinity,” I
happened to be at a conference where Intel’s current leader was onstage,
explaining its slip-up. “Companies make mistakes,” Brian Krzanich, Intel’s
graying and genial chief executive, told an audience of mostly younger
technologists in May at the Re/code conference in California. After leading the transformation
of computing from mainframes to personal computers to laptops, the company
“wanted it to stop there,” Krzanich admitted. “But the market kept moving.”
That, in fact, is the theme that pulses through Malone’s
book. In the half-century since Intel’s visionary founders joined the
workforce, the pace of technological change has only accelerated, creating —
and almost as quickly rendering obsolete — inventions, companies, even
industries. For more than a generation, the company that best managed those
forces was Intel.
Intel sat “at the center of the world’s economy, the
multi-billion-dollar corporation on which the entire electronics revolution
would rest,” Malone writes. Far from wanting technology to stop evolving, Intel
invested massively in research and development, pushing the boundaries not only
of technology but of the technology business.
Its founding engineers helped pioneer the silicon-based
memory chips from which California’s storied Silicon Valley drew its name, then
assembled the team that pretty much invented the microprocessors that enabled
the creation of personal computers and the computer-driven era we live in
today. So far ahead of the curve was Intel that it often had to educate its
customers in how to deploy its technologies.
In business, too, Intel was an innovator. It offered its
users services and customization, not just off-the-shelf, mass-produced
products, and understood the importance of cannibalizing its own products to
adopt new technologies and create new businesses.
Success brought challenges: Intel outmaneuvered American
and Japanese copycat manufacturers, sweated out prolonged economic downcycles,
and became a fulcrum of U.S. trade policy for years. Yet it always survived,
strengthened.
Businesses, ultimately, are manifestations of their
people and especially their leaders. Intel was emphatically so. The vision that
drove the company was that of three men, {each} legendary in Silicon Valley,
whose intertwined stories form the narrative spine of Malone’s book. “There is
. . . something almost biblical about
the relationship,” Malone suggests, “an unholy Trinity.”
The company’s founder and the “Father” of Malone’s minor heresy, Robert
Noyce, was a charismatic and charming skier, pilot and brilliant engineer who
forged Intel’s original team in 1968 from among his colleagues at an earlier
technology enterprise he’d created, Fairchild Semiconductor. Chief among them
was Gordon Moore, another surpassingly smart engineer, who in 1965 wrote a
paper laying out what became known as “Moore’s Law,” the observation that the
number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years.
The recognition that processing speeds or memory could increase at that
exponential rate enabled Intel to plan and roll out new technologies at a
faster pace than its rivals.
Moore also was the guardian of the third of Intel’s
great leaders, Andrew Grove, a strong-willed and sometimes irascible
Hungarian-born engineer who was brought to Intel after its founding and
eventually oversaw the company’s greatest growth. While Noyce and Moore got
much credit — and enormous wealth — for founding Intel, it was Grove’s
ferocious drive that propelled the company to quickly commercialize new
technologies, shed old ones and become dominant in computing.
At the center of the book is the running friction
between Noyce and Grove. Grove respected Noyce but disdained his leadership
style. “Grove was the brilliant but truculent Son in a perpetual Oedipal battle
with Noyce,” Malone writes. They clashed repeatedly; Moore provided the buffer
that allowed both men to exercise their wills and Intel to flourish.
Each of these men is worthy of a biography; Grove wrote
his own, “Only the Paranoid Survive,”
an important and powerful memoir of life in the 20th century. Malone sets this
new book apart by focusing on the interactions among the trio, illuminating the
frictions inside Intel. He is careful to credit the many other engineers who
helped build Intel into the first Silicon Valley company to achieve a stock
market value of half a trillion dollars.
Those stories
often give the book a discursive, meandering feel that Malone accentuates with
declarations of the importance of every matter, great or small. When
an Intel customer doesn’t insist on exclusive rights to a new Intel technology,
Malone characterizes it as “one of the biggest business mistakes of the
century.” The death of Noyce in 1990 was a shock, Malone writes, but then adds: “There has never been
as devastating a piece of news before or since in the Valley.”
Malone is a
technology enthusiast; indeed, his other book titles seem to leave little space
for the importance he ascribes to Intel: “Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and
Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company” and “Infinite Loop: How Apple, the
World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane.”
Readers may be stymied by Malone’s inside-the-Valley use of techno-jargon that
often omits plain-English explanations for some of the most significant
advances he describes. (He includes a “Tutorial on Technology” as an appendix, which is useful for
understanding where technology is going but less so for where it has been.)
But most
problematic for both Malone and Intel is the abbreviated denouement to this
book: When Krzanich became chief executive in 2013, after 31 years at the
company, Intel had less than 1 percent of the mobile market, the new business
segment dominated by companies like Apple and Samsung.
That raises perhaps the most profound unanswered question of the book
and of Silicon Valley’s past half-century: How is it that even the most agile
and powerful companies falter and lose the cadence of innovation that made them
great? Malone doesn’t offer an answer. What he has produced is popular history,
the tale of an epoch-defining industrial romp and the three men who led it.
