Intel's Barrett: 'Best is ahead' - Craig Barrett

Electronic News, March 4, 2002 by Tom Murphy

SAN FRANCISCO--To recover from the deepest economic trough the technology industry has ever experienced, Intel Corp. CEO Craig Barrett told developers last week they have to make the end-user excited again about new products.

Barrett told an audience of about 4,000 developers that he has never been as optimistic about the prospect of growth for the industry, even though the semiconductor sector as a whole saw a 35 percent drop in revenues last year.

"The best is still ahead of us," Barrett said. "We spent about $20 billion last year to develop new products and new technology that will ultimately result in new excitement for the end-user."

The notion of an industry innovating itself out of a downturn is certainly a familiar sentiment, and while Intel introduced new technology, nothing indicated that any of it was a driver for an era of strong growth. Despite that, Barrett did indicate that the economic environment for the computer industry was stabilizing while the communications industry still had a ways to go before it reached stability.

Barrett said during his business travels around the globe last year, several countries expressed a keen desire to invest heavily in communications and computing infrastructure in order to take advantage of sustained economic growth opportunities that the technology industry promises. Barrett said markets in China, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia and Latin America promised the best growth opportunities for Intel. He was particularly bullish on China and Latin America.

On the home front, the captain of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said the infrastructure was in place, but it was time for the communications industry to stop dragging its heels in the rollout of broadband services to homes and business.

Central to Barrett's speech about creating excitement was a demonstration of a 3GHz PC that was used in conjunction with a digital camera and software to render 3D animation of Barrett as an extreme snowboarder on the streets of San Francisco.

"Every country continues to realize that the future depends on creating value and expanding their knowledge base," Barrett said. "Their economies depend on value creation."

Technology will drive the opportunities in developing economies, Barrett argued. "Technology is a growth engine," he said, adding that 70 percent of Intel's revenue comes from business outside the United States.

Intel also released a new line of processors for its server customers. The Xeon processors use essentially the same core as Intel's Pentium 4 processors for desktop computers; however, they are made with more cache memory to specifically address the needs of a different computing segment. Intel also released its E7500 Plumas chipset, the company's latest foray into a market dominated by Server Works Inc., a company owned by Broadcom Corp. (See story page 16.).