A New Intel Brand: Do Wholesale Changes Foretell a Better Day at Intel?

I’ve constantly considered Intel to be one of the global’s excellent-managed Tweet Board era brands. Last yr, Interbrand ranked Intel as the 5th most valuable emblem inside the global. And it always remains in the pinnacle ten due to the fact control works difficult to make sure the logo stays relevant within the rapid-shifting semiconductor marketplace.

Of past due, Intel has garnered plenty of press concerning the sweeping adjustments management intends to make within the corporation’s brand and product line. In many methods, these changes will send the world’s largest chipmaker into uncharted territory. Some analysts are announcing that Intel’s new direction will necessitate growing a new emblem. However, at its core, I accept as true with Intel will very a great deal remain the identical employer, specially because the deeply set up middle values that force the Intel emblem are alive and properly and running exactly as designed.

Under founder Andy Grove and successor CEO Craig Barrett, Intel thrived with the aid of concentrating on the microprocessors that energy private computer systems. They invested billions of greenbacks in flowers that might crank out tens of millions of processors, and in the technique they helped supply lifestyles to the age of the private laptop with ever-faster, extra effective chips. Occasionally, Grove and Barrett ventured into areas past microprocessors and private computer systems. But from the outside, the ones tentative forays appeared more like cautious experiments than full commitments to new markets. For the most element, Intel stuck to its very narrow cognizance, and in doing proceeded to bury the competition.

A New Direction

New CEO Paul Otellini seems to be guidance Intel in a completely distinct course. Instead of closing targeted on PCs, he is pushing the organisation to play a key technological role in a half of-dozen fields, along with patron electronics, wireless communications and health care. And instead of continuing to cognizance solely on microprocessors, he desires Intel to create plenty of chips and software after which meld them together into what he calls “platforms.”

With Grove and Barrett at the helm, Intel first furnished customers with full units of era ingredients, which includes microprocessors, chipsets, communications chips and base software program abilities. Under Otellini, Intel will broaden entire era structures based on Intel elements, an evolution quality evidenced with the advent of IntelÒ Centrino(TM) cellular era. Even the “Intel Inside” emblem will disappear, to get replaced by an up to date Intel emblem with a swirl round it to indicate movement. And for the primary time since the early Nineteen Nineties, the corporation will add a tagline: “Leap in advance.”

At first glance, all of this seems like a pointy departure from the organisation Grove and Barrett constructed. However, upon nearer examination, these movements grow to be very “Grovesk” at their center.

In December 2005, Grove’s photograph regarded on the quilt of Fortune mag, accompanying an editorial entitled “How to Become a Great Leader.” Fortune stated that Grove, sixty nine, has by no means lost track of the fact — that Intel has continually been one wrong circulate faraway from catastrophe and that a closed thoughts is the trap door to the abyss. During his tenure as CEO, Grove made severa “bet-the-farm actions” may want to have killed the agency however ended up propelling it ahead. For instance, his decision to get out of the now commodity memory chip enterprise and awareness entirely on microprocessors. Or the selection to stick with Intel’s mainstay chip technology, CISC, instead of pursue the new, more glamorous, RISC era. Or the selection to attention on microprocessors for PCs and make investments billions of bucks in plant life to manufacture them.