Beautiful Teams

Final Notes

Edom Engineering staff weren't the types to wait around and let algae gather on the pond. On the day of my email, they read and responded to it, but then plunged back into the depths of their work.

No manager called on me to justify or explain my email—they probably knew very well what was going on, whether or not George had been forthright with them—but the direction of the Longjump project did not change, either. Ultimately, with the new business model based on reselling a competitor's system, we met our stated goals and finished the project on time with a formal success status. The product fizzled in the marketplace.

As a matter of fact, RISC chips in general never lived up to the hype. Conventional chip makers found ways to improve speed despite the supposedly crippling complexity of their designs, using such strategies as prefetching instructions, predictive scheduling, and multicores. Some of these strategies, such as breaking large instructions into smaller parts with a consistent structure, they borrowed from RISC design.

The conventional manufacturers kept costs low through economies of scale, and invested the profits they garnered through market dominance in high-priced, state-of-the-art facilities that could produce chips even more cheaply. RISC manufacturers never caught up. So, although RISC companies remain in the field, RISC as a new computer market turned out to be a miscalculation by a large group of computer industry pundits and investors. Edom Engineering's ...