A Historical Perspective on Semiconductors and Moore's Law - Craig Barrett

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