Craig Barrett on Moore's Law
See it here - A Historical Perspective on Semiconductors and Moore's Law
Craig's lessons from 40 years of working in the semiconductor industry -
1. Problem Solving Methodology and getting a definition of where you want to go. There is no replacement for sophisticated problem solving. That's why engineers will always be needed and that's why many CEOs of the fortune 500 companies have engineering background. Ask "why" about 5 times.
2. Changing the rules of the game. What did Apple do to make the ipod so successful? they made it easier to download music legally. Changed the rules on how MP3 players are sold. Motorola used to be the premier supplier of cell phones but had analog phones. Nokia moved to the digital side and changed the rules of the game. Kodak recognized that the rules were changing around them but they were wed to their old business model and couldn't change. Intel Inside marketting campaign changed the rules.
3. No matter how big your company is or how smart your engineers are, you do not own all the smart engineers of the world. How to use the engineering talent outside your work? Fund those ideas, become a VC. Intel is one of the largest VC firm in the firm funding everything around our microprocessor area. Also recognized the importance of industries, fund 100 million a year in university projects. Life threatening challanges to big companies with multi-billion dollar research budgets come not from big companies but from one or two researchers at some university who have a bright idea.
4. If you want to be an executive, grw thick skin as press and analyst will write whatever they want about even though they know nothing about your industry.
5. what makes companies, economies and countries competitive are - smart people, smart ideas and the right environment to put smart people together with smart ideas
Saturday, February 13, 2010
From IT to ET (Energy Technology) - Tom Seibel
Tom Siebel spoke at Stanford sometime ago.
See it here - Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT
Key takeaways -
1. First few minutes of talk shed light on how IT grew at 17% compound rate in the last 20 years of 20th century. Since 2000, the growth rate in IT has slowed down to about 3% that matches the growth rate in GDP. Basically IT has become a matured industry.
2. Regulation will be the dominant focus for governments in developed countries for several years to come.
3. World population will reach 9 billion people. A very significant number of those in developed countries will be more than 65 years old. The per capita use of energy has gone up significantly and is now at unsustainable levels. Supply of oil will run out in the next 50 years.
4. This creates major issues and thus major opportunities in food, water, healthcare and energy. This is the Moore's law of our times
5. Shanghai, China is the new center of gravity for innovation in the world. The leading University in Shanghai admits about 3,000 students from a pool of 8 million applicants. This is a mind-boggling number. They have high work ethic, are very smart and work very very hard.
6. Siebel launched two parallel efforts -
(a) $20 million prize for an energy free home that costs the same amount of money to build that a conventional home would and satisfies all the building codes. The house has to be on 2000 sq ft., 3 bd room and 2 bath. Teams from all over the world participating in the prize.
(b) C3 - a company to respond to the market needs. C3 will build software to manage, monitor, mitigate and monitize carbon footprint. Just like public companies today have to report their financial statements to the SEC, they will be required to report their carbon usage to the government. This is a major opportunity that is going to form in the coming years in the US and European Union. C3 is already up and running and has a stellar group of people involved in it.
See it here - Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT
Key takeaways -
1. First few minutes of talk shed light on how IT grew at 17% compound rate in the last 20 years of 20th century. Since 2000, the growth rate in IT has slowed down to about 3% that matches the growth rate in GDP. Basically IT has become a matured industry.
2. Regulation will be the dominant focus for governments in developed countries for several years to come.
3. World population will reach 9 billion people. A very significant number of those in developed countries will be more than 65 years old. The per capita use of energy has gone up significantly and is now at unsustainable levels. Supply of oil will run out in the next 50 years.
4. This creates major issues and thus major opportunities in food, water, healthcare and energy. This is the Moore's law of our times
5. Shanghai, China is the new center of gravity for innovation in the world. The leading University in Shanghai admits about 3,000 students from a pool of 8 million applicants. This is a mind-boggling number. They have high work ethic, are very smart and work very very hard.
6. Siebel launched two parallel efforts -
(a) $20 million prize for an energy free home that costs the same amount of money to build that a conventional home would and satisfies all the building codes. The house has to be on 2000 sq ft., 3 bd room and 2 bath. Teams from all over the world participating in the prize.
(b) C3 - a company to respond to the market needs. C3 will build software to manage, monitor, mitigate and monitize carbon footprint. Just like public companies today have to report their financial statements to the SEC, they will be required to report their carbon usage to the government. This is a major opportunity that is going to form in the coming years in the US and European Union. C3 is already up and running and has a stellar group of people involved in it.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Why Android vs. iPhone war is not quite the PS vs. Apple of the 80s
Content is the king, this is the key to understanding why Apple will continue to succeed with iphone, ipod and now ipad.
1. Pretty soon Apple's profits from selling the apps and music would far exceed its profits from selling the devices.
2. This should be (if not already) a wake up call for the device makers (Google, Nokia, Motorola and the like) and more so for the telecom companies (Verizon, ATT and the like). They would want to be in on the content and apps goldmine.
3. Telecom companies especially Verizon would want to have its own marketplace for apps and music. That would create tension between them and Android marketplace.
4. Google will most likely come up with a revenue sharing model with the mobile careers for the apps and music that they sell through the cell phone networks. That, just like the google ads, can be their killer app.
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