Intel, Google and marketing gurus

This week Intel has been in the news as it has spilled news of Microsoft's Origami Project in a carefully orchestrated product and buzz build.  Revealed at its semi-annual Developer Forum, the company has also tried to pump up its prospects a week after revealing a precipitous decline in revenues and a falling market share for the processors that it pioneered.  Unfortunately, for those who dream of Intel's resurgence, this won't do it.  The moral of this story? Stick to what it is that you do superbly. AMD's success is only a small part of the troubles besetting Intel.  The real problem is that Intel has forgotten what made it great.

At the same time a video has been getting a great deal of attention on the web that demonstrates, in almost frightening detail, the kind of thinking that has hobbled Intel in recent years and will continue to do so until all vestiges of it are rooted out and the company returns to its roots.   The video is of a speech given by a self-anointed marketing guru named Seth Goodin to a crowd at Google.  The same fate will befall the search engine giant if it listens too closely.

Once upon a time there was a band of insanely talented, driven young materials science engineers who had helped create the Integrated Circuit (IC), launch the Space Race by delivering miniaturized electronics to NASA, and wanted to get out from under the stuffy East Coast ethos of the Fairchild Semiconductor Company.  Three of the key ones were Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove.  All three were bleeding edge, balls to the wall, chip guys—the kinds of driven hardware geeks of their day who thought nothing of spending days without sleep baking and babying silicon wafers in special ovens until they mastered the alchemistry of semiconductor manufacture.

They started a company called Intel, to build memory chips.  They also created in one tiny skunkworks, a microprocessor.  No one much knew what to do with the microprocessor, and the project was about to be cancelled when IBM settled on it to power a new generation of personal computers.  The rest was history.

But like all good fables, this one couldn't last forever.  After the departure of Andy Grove a few years ago Intel became obsessed with marketing, and started labeling things it was making with acronyms like Viiv.  Much of this was due to the ascendancy of the current chief executive, Paul Ottellini…you guessed it, a lifelong marketing guy. This is the message espoused by Mr Godin—technology doesn't mean a thing, all that matters is how you tell your message.  This is exactly the wrong idea.

It is perhaps forgivable for an Internet marketer.  After all, the bottom line of the Internet is that you're just one-click away from oblivion, so who cares about your technology—marketing is all.  Whiter shirts! More sex when I drink Bud Light! And perhaps this message is particularly well suited to the advertising geniuses of the Internet Age at Google.

But Intel has lost the hairy edge of chip design—except at its Israeli skunkworks, where the dual core processors used in the latest Apple G5s come from…but then, those are embattled guys with something to prove.  The point is that technology does matter, and while Intel was trying to devise marketing strategies, AMD just kept its head down and created hairy, balls to the wall chip designs that were better than Intel's. 

You can see the problem starting to appear at Google as well.  The company was once filled with a handful of search engine geeks who wanted nothing better than to optimize the search engine.  Now they have heard how brilliant they all are and are determined to build products far outside of their expertise, and so keep churning out decent, but hardly inspired, knock-offs of other products: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Video, etc. etc.  Why bother?  Googlers ought to be digging deep into the universe of search, and improving it for each of us…not aiming to be the next online monopoly.

The moral of this story?  Stick to what it is that you do superbly, and push the envelope in that, constantly delighting and enthralling customers.  Don't forget what got you to the top in the first place. Want to bet that it has something to do with engineering, or invention in some way?  Software, hardware, process…or all three like iTunes? 

I'll guarantee it wasn't some pathetic marketing slogan.