Biography | Andrew Grove — The Cubicle Window That Faced the Great America Wheel

People treat Intel's shift from memory chips to microprocessors as if a board vote settled it in an afternoon.

The man who forced the question was sitting in a cubicle, looking at an amusement-park wheel.

By mid-1985 Andrew Grove was president and chief operating officer. Gordon Moore was chairman and chief executive.

Japanese makers had taken the DRAM market Intel had once owned. The company lost its bearings through 1984 and into 1985.

Grove later wrote the scene in Only the Paranoid Survive, published in 1996.

He was in his office with Moore. Their mood was downbeat.

He looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of California's Great America revolving in the distance, then turned back and asked what a new chief executive would do if the board threw them both out.

Moore answered without hesitation: he would get the company out of memories.

Grove wrote that he stared, numb, then asked why the two of them should not walk out the door, come back, and do it themselves.

The pin is the Santa Clara campus at 2200 Mission College Boulevard. Great America still sits across the freeway. The wheel was a real object in a real window, not a metaphor.

The conversation did not close the factories that week.

Grove himself dated the talk to the middle of 1985, the exit to mid-1986, and the return to profit to another year after that.

Thousands of jobs went when plants shut. Intel had invented the microprocessor in 1971 and sold the 8088 to IBM for the first personal computer. Memory was still the company's idea of itself.

The walk back through the door was the decision to treat that idea as disposable.

Grove became chief executive in 1987. Time named him Man of the Year a decade after the window.

The Robert Noyce Building now on this lot is later fabric. The sightline to the park is the part that has not moved.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.