The Intel Trinity
How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Based on unprecedented access to the corporation’s archives, The Intel Trinity is the first full history of Intel Corporation—the essential company of the digital age— told through the lives of the three most important figures in the company’s history: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove.
Often hailed the “most important company in the world,” Intel remains, more than four decades after its inception, a defining company of the global digital economy. The legendary inventors of the microprocessor-the single most important product in the modern world-Intel today builds the tiny “engines” that power almost every intelligent electronic device on the planet.
But the true story of Intel is the human story of the trio of geniuses behind it. Michael S. Malone reveals how each brought different things to Intel, and at different times. Noyce, the most respected high tech figure of his generation, brought credibility (and money) to the company’s founding; Moore made Intel the world’s technological leader; and Grove, has relentlessly driven the company to ever-higher levels of success and competitiveness. Without any one of these figures, Intel would never have achieved its historic success; with them, Intel made possible the personal computer, Internet, telecommunications, and the personal electronics revolutions.
The Intel Trinity is not just the story of Intel’s legendary past; it also offers an analysis of the formidable challenges that lie ahead as the company struggles to maintain its dominance, its culture, and its legacy.
With eight pages of black-and-white photos.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The manufacturer of the micro-processors that power Windows computers and other electronic gadgetry acquires quasi-divine status in this awestruck corporate history. Journalist Malone (The Future Arrived Yesterday) peppers countless superlatives even the "Intel Inside" ad blitz constituted "a historic achievement" throughout his engaging, but disorganized, over-padded, yet sometimes cursory account of the company's technological breakthroughs and business-strategy coups. The book succeeds in its portrayal of the hair-raising travails of longtime CEO Andy Grove ("the greatest businessman of the age"), who grew up Jewish in Nazi-occupied Hungary and then fled communism. Meanwhile, a lavish chronicle of Robert Noyce's uneventful middle-American backstory is a less-than-gripping part of the author's attempt to resurrect the Intel co-founder as a Silicon Valley titan. This is a serviceable account of the digital revolution's hardware side, but Malone inflates Intel into the semi-conductor equivalent of the triune godhead, styling Noyce as "the beloved and charismatic father," Grove as "the brilliant but truculent son in a perpetual Oedipal battle," and co-founder Gordon Moore as the "Holy Spirit of the digital age," his celebrated Moore's Law integrated circuits double their performance every year or two propelling mankind towards the "singularity" when humans and computers become one. Less bombast and myth-making might have yielded a more substantive saga. 8-page b&w photo insert.