Andy Grove in his book 'Only the paranoid survive', talks about a point in the life of a company where it will face a combination of internal and external unanticipated forces, that will conspire to make the existing business strategy unviable. He called it an 'inflection point'.
In the case of Intel, such a point came when its memory chips business came under competition from Japanese and Korean players. And micro-processor business was not a major percentage of Intel's business. But Andy Grove put all his energies behind the micro-processors business and Intel became what it is today.
In a recent article in The Economist, he says that the computer industry has always practiced a healthy attitude towards creative destruction, something that is not shared by other industries. Computer firms come and go all the time. He was probably taking a shot at the US government support to ailing banks, the automotive industry and the airline industry. He has asked for the health and energy industries to be run more like the computer industry for them to be more efficient.
His with is still intact, despite battling Parkinson's disease, and his desire to provoke is strong as ever. But his achievements ensure that his provocations are worth paying attention to. Not many people in this world can garner such respect and attention. And it is the desire of every person to become like that; to be heard and respected.
And your ability to quote and be read later. And coin terms that stay on for a long time, become part of the dictionary. Like 'inflection point'. And 'knowledge turns'. 'Knowledge turn' is the time it takes for an experiment to proceed from hypothesis to results, and then to a new hypothesis - around 18 months for chip-making. This probably is what is the essence of Moore's law.
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