Only the Paranoid Survive

by Andrew S. Grove

Our competitors were reluctant to pay for technology that we used to give away practically for free. Consequently, in the transition to the next microprocessor generation, we ended up with no second source and became the only source of microprocessors to our customers. Eventually our competition stopped waiting for our largesse and developed similar products on their own, but this took a number of years. The impact this relatively minor change had on the entire PC industry was enormous. A key commodity, the standard microprocessor on which most personal computers were built, became available only from its developer—us. This, in turn, had two consequences. First, our influence on our customers increased. From their standpoint, this might have appeared as a “10X” force. Second, since most PCs increasingly were built on microprocessors from one supplier, they became more alike. This, in turn, had an impact on software developers, who could now concentrate their efforts on developing software for fundamentally similar computers built by many manufacturers.