Robert Noyce

[Robert Noyce] was a very, he tend to look out a long long distance ... He used to say one of the biggest steps in the industrial revolution was the development of the fractional horsepower motor. When you could take and get the kind of mechanical power that you needed just the right amount at the right place and he said the microprocessor is the fractional horsepower computer.

Another person you to give an awful lot of credit at Intel for is Andy Grove and Andy kept everything under very tight control and later experience showed me how important that might be. At one point, the microprocessor sales ... a major portion was through distribution and Andy started almost reading the riot act to the marketing people saying we do not have enough visibility from the distributors as to what the sales out are. Later in another experience I find in another company that they think they got great sales and they are shipping tons of stuff to the distributor but it's sitting there in the distributor shelf and that's what Andy wanted to avoid. So where others would say well it's through distribution, there's not much you can do. Andy wouldnn't take that for an answer. He would say we've got to find a way to solve that problem.

As the company grew, [Andy Grove] was worried about it being becoming disorganized. He put in what was called Management by Objective and it was a real learning experience for a lot of us engineers because part of the process would be you do a progress report every month but part of it you predict what you're going to accomplish ... in the coming month and part of your progress report is you compare what you actually did with what you predicted you were going to do ... one of the examples is you know the engineer says oh I have this project completed in three months. A month later he's still saying it's three months. Andy would point out that means you made zero progress in a month and the rate you are going, it's going to take an infinite among of time. He put in a lot of discipline that I think really helped Intel be successful in its product development and keep people focus on getting the right job done.

As we look on into the future, we're going to find that we can in effect put ourselves wherever we want to be without moving. We can create the environment we want around us. For instance, if I look on the road there, we find most of the cars that are driving by are not carrying goods. They're carrying brains, trying to take the brain to the place where the work is to be done. With modern communications and the extension of what we can see in communications and in computer power in getting information transferred back and forth, there is no reason why you could not carry on this interview at home, at your office with me at my office, etc. And I think that as we look farther into the future, we're going to find that people will live where it is conducive to live not where it is conducive to work. That the movement of the work to the individual will be much easier because as I say, most of our people are doing knowledge work, not work with physical materials so at least that half of the population, today's population, could work wherever they please without any limitation that they have to go into a particular point to do their work as long as the communications and information is available to them wherever they happen to be. Wouldn't you rather work in Hawaii.