Michael Malone's new book about Intel, and the "Trinity."
Last Friday I sat down in a book store in Santa Cruz and read about half of the new Michael Malone book. I may read it in it's entirety someday, but probably not. It's a big, fat book with thin pages (which tells one how big a book it really is).
And yet for all of its bigness, it tells so little. It repeats the stories about Noyce, Moore, and Grove. It adds in Barrett and Otellini, over the 1980s-era hero stories, but it tells essentially nothing about what made Intel what it was, what it was like to work for Intel, why Intel succeeded when a dozen fairly strong competitors failed (e.g., AMI, Signetics, Monolithic Memories, Electronic Arrays, Mostek, not to mention National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Fairchild, etc.)
I would've much preferred maybe a hundred interviews with a hundred people who worked for Intel at various times, telling the tales of various mask designers, applications engineers, fab workers, assembly line workers, personnel managers, senior managers, funders and founders, etc.
Instead, it's the same old Story of the Founders. Plus Two. But still minus the story of the dozens of engineers and managers who made the company. No significant mention of Ted Jenkins, or Tom Rowe, or Dov Frohmann, or Gerry Parker, or Will Kauffman, or the guys who invented the first fab equipment (there were no fab equipment providers to speak of back in the late 60s), or who invented the first rubylith and primitive CAD tools.
Anyway, the book is already "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" in length, so adding all this other stuff is probably not realistic.
The book is OK for those who haven't already read the various books about the Valley, about Moore, about Noyce, about Grove, but it doesn't add much that is new.
I learned a few items about the time when Noyce was ready to sell the company and Moore said he would be willing to take over and a few tidbits about what motivated some of the founders, but overall I learned little.
It was like a meal with no calories.
It didn't capture either the excitement or the terror of working for Intel in the 70s and 80s.
(BTW, a friend of mine who joined even earlier than I did said it reflected the outlook of a writer who mostly met Noyce, Moore, and Grove at Silicon Valley parties and events. With Barrett and Otellini as afterthoughts, during the boom in other parts of the Valley. I think he's right.)
--Tim May
