You make a point of saying that these strategic inflection points – crisis moments where the world shifts – are not limited to the realm of technology. ..MR0-
They can affect a newspaper, a store, a high-tech company, a PR firm, whomever. If you are in a small or medium-size town and a Wal-Mart comes in, suddenly one of your competitors is so much more powerful than the competitors you have been accustomed to that it entirely changes the way you have to look at your business. When one of these ““10X’’ changes occurs, people are going to be so definitely thrown out of kilter that a whole new way of doing business has to emerge out of it. You will never put Humpty Dumpty back again. Strategic inflection points apply to individuals, too. There are lots of people who have spent decades honing a skill. Major change in the world is creeping up on them, and they’re not taking advantage. Your career is your business, and you have to manage it like a businessman. ..MR.-
Is the adjustment always difficult when a company shifts its focus to accommodate these changes? ..MR0-
To pull that last plug is very hard. You can look around and see companies hanging onto their past like a lifeline. When you let that lifeline go, you are entering the valley of death, and in the valley of death there’s a lot of people lost. And you’re not very sure yourself of the answers. ..MR.-
At a time like that you need your employees to work hard and make sacrifices. How does that square with the new reality that people owe primary loyalty not to a company but their own careers? ..MR0-
First you have to arm these people with the belief that you have a way to get out of this. Then you need to imbue these people with the likelihood that all of you will win if you stick together. People will ride through the valley of death if they assign a reasonable probability of making it across and doing all right on the other end. ..MR.-
How will the Internet change businesses? ..MR0-
The Internet is eliminating the person in the middle of many common transactions. Instead of using an 800 number the consumer is going to tap into a database, get information, place orders, do various things – whether we are talking banks or travel reservations, or ordering books, cars, TVs, health care, whatever. If I were in one of those industries, or I were an individual earning my living that way, I would view the Internet as a tidal wave that’s going to wipe me out. I would be running as far as my feet go, redoing all my reservations systems, order systems, customer databases, so that masses of people would be able to reach them from their computer. ..MR.-
Do you think that these people will use the so-called network computers that don’t have hard-disk drives, and cost only $500? ..MR0-
No. The computer people will use on the Internet will be very, very different from today’s, but also very different from the network computer. ..MR.-
Is Microsoft’s massive response to the Internet as good a job to responding to a strategic inflection point as you’ve seen? ..MR0-
They are doing a brilliant job. They have broken all their rules to pursue the evolution of the Internet with everything they’ve got. Contrast Microsoft’s response to the way IBM responded to the emergence of personal computers – it’s night and day. ..MR.-
Intel’s own chips keep getting more powerful and cheaper. What are some of the changes that will come from this? ..MR0-
Processing power is going to be practically free and practically infinite. This will allow us to turn automatic 3-D photorealistic animation into a ubiquitous reality within two or three years. Computers will use 3-D animation to do anything, making today’s applications look like black-and-white screens compared to color. ..MR.-
You’ve dealt with a serious personal crisis recently: your successful fight against prostate cancer. Did this approach toward inflection points inform your own action? ..MR0-
I think implicitly some of the lessons I learned in my business life came to work in how I dealt with it. I had to chart a course of action that literally nobody recommended to me – not even the person who performed the [radiation] treatment. After I assessed these facts, I had to bring up enough conviction in that course of action to set off on this journey and throw myself into it. ..MR.-
One question about the Pentium bug – if you discovered tomorrow a similar anomaly in your new chip, the Pentium Pro, how would you react? ..MR0-
I wouldn’t want to commit myself completely to any course. But I can tell you some things we have changed. We are automatically informing anybody and everybody of problems that we have with our products. And we are a whole lot more responsive to people’s complaints than we were before.
