Technology Trends

Intel President Paul Otellini, who will become CEO in May, has a blog. But it’s an internal blog, available only to Intel employees. Of course, there are always information leaks in companies the size of Intel (85,000 employees). So it’s not a surprise that the contents of Otellini’s blog are now appearing. In “Intel blog: what the boss thinks,” the Mercury News looks at this blog and also at other executives who blog directly for the public. The Mercury News also posted on its site the contents of Otellini’s blog (PDF format, 16 pages, 121 KB) for the period going from December 14, 2004 to January 19, 2005. Read more for selected excerpts.

Here is the introduction of the Mercury News article.

Like many a corporate executive, Intel President Paul Otellini rarely deviates from the company line in public. But read Otellini’s blog and you’ll see what he really thinks.

In contrast to the public online journals of most corporate executives, Otellini’s blog is strictly for Intel employees’ eyes only, published on the company’s internal Web site. But a copy of the 8-week-old blog obtained by the Mercury News shows Otellini unplugged, conversing candidly with Intel’s rank and file about the challenges facing the Santa Clara chip giant. Otellini, who becomes Intel’s next chief executive in May, even praises Advanced Micro Devices, his Sunnyvale rival whose existence company executives take pains to ignore.

If you read the Otellini’s blog as published by the Mercury News, you’ll notice that there are only four entries from Intel’s President. It’s more a weekly memo than a daily blog. Of course, I can understand this. Being Intel’s President and next CEO certainly guarantees a long weekly working time.

In his second entry, Otellini mentions that he was overwhelmed by the response to his blog, with 350 comments posted in the first 24 hours after publication. The file provided by the Mercury News lists only 16 comments to the first entry. This means that comments are certainly edited, and probably because many comments carry identical messages.

Now, here is my personal selection of Otellini’s writings, starting with his first post where he recognizes that his internal blog will eventually become public.

Why am I doing this? Well, it seemed like a good idea to be able to create an ongoing vehicle to share my thoughts and observations on Intel and our industry with our employees, and to allow you an opportunity to have a platform for your thoughts or responses. While this is intended as an internal blog, I recognize that it will become public — welcome to the Internet! As a result, please recognize that I may be a bit limited in my comments and responses to protect Intel, and that we may exercise some editorial privilege on your comments for the same reason. I want to be clear on this up front. This is the price of entry to this blog.

On December 19, Otellini wrote some comments about the Itanium family of microprocessors.

Yes, Itanium is taking longer to achieve market and financial success than we first envisioned. But we are making significant headway in the replacement of generations of RISC microprocessors with Itanium. This year, Itanium will out ship every RISC processor except Power or Sparc. Roughly 20% of the world’s supercomputers are now built on Itanium. I always felt it would take at least a decade for us to establish this architecture. It simply takes that long to establish the performance roadmap, and to develop a critical mass of software and users. We will stay the course on this product line, and we will succeed.

In his January 10 entry, he spoke about the tsunami in South Asia, but also about competition from AMD.

We have a significant competitor to our Xeon product line in the Opteron line from AMD. This is the first significant competition we have seen with the market segment for “high volume servers” that Intel invented. We identified this competitive threat over a year ago, and did a great job in 2004 by shipping record Xeon volumes, achieving a very rapid ramp of our 64 bit extension based product, and minimizing share loss. While I hate losing share, the reality is that our competitor has a very strong product offering. We did a good job in 2004, and cannot let up, as I expect 2005 to be even more competitive in this area. There is no quick fix or easy answer here.

I doubt he ever said this to a customer.

In the latest note, dated January 19, Otellini comments the reorganization of Intel into five divisions and about how some employees read about it on the Web before being informed internally.

Even with this “beat the web” approach, some employees have mentioned that they read about in on the web before they heard about it from Intel. My apologies, but it seems that it is very hard to move faster than internet speed. In any event, we are off and running on creating what one analyst called Intel 3.0. He talked about us originally being the Memory company, then the Microprocessor company, and now the Platform company. While there is some accuracy in this statement, I think it may be a bit premature to declare this as a done.” We have much work to do before we can truly claim to have capitalized on this fundamental shift in our business. I found many of the analyst comments regarding the reorganization to be very interesting.

Just in case you forgot about Intel’s reorganization last January, please read this article from CNET News.com, “Intel launches broad reorganization.”

So, is this a real internal blog or just a weekly memo to employees? I don’t think this is important. What matters is that every Intel employee can comment on the company’s strategy.

Sources: Dean Takahashi, Mercury News, February 15, 2005; Paul Otellini’s blog; Steven Musil and Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com, January 17, 2005

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