Intel's fifth chief
Published: 12 Aug 2004 12:00 BST
Speaking about the digital world, Intel has talked about going beyond the PC, which is where you derive most of your revenue. Will taking on the Sonys and the Samsungs require a different mind-set from what you're accustomed to? I do not look at this as taking them on. I look at this as creating categories of products for which they may be the two largest customers -- or among the two largest customers. In many ways, they are the heart of where this business is going, and you will see Hewlett-Packard and Dell trying to move into the CE side so that they can take advantage of it.
I think it is a very interesting dynamic that is already showing signs of disrupting the traditional pace of the consumer electronics industry. The rate at which PC technologies have been incorporating CE devices is astounding. It drives their design cycles to be much more rapid and PC-like than they have in the past, when they lived with five- or six-year design cycles.
The Samsungs and the Dells are going to go at each other in the consumer market, but you are agnostic. That is, Intel will supply to Samsung just as soon as it will supply to Dell?
We will supply anybody. But I think I look at it a little bit differently. I think there is an emerging set of standards around the digital home that all of us as consumers will demand. You may not understand the nits and nats of the standards. But you are going to want the things to work together wirelessly, to be self-configuring, to be really simple out of the box so that you don't need a 17-year-old or a network manager in your house to manage this stuff.
That requires interoperability, and it also requires that all these companies work together, because no one consumer is willing to buy only one company's stuff. We are all going to want to be able to mix and match brands, as we build up new things in our homes, and that requires a degree of interoperability that Intel is particularly good at driving, in terms of standards.
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