CHAPTER 17
INTEL’S WAR
No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
—John Locke
Since its founding in 1968 by Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, Intel has been a leader in the silicon revolution, having developed the microprocessors that formed the foundation of the PC Revolution (the Intel 8088 chip was selected by IBM as the CPU of its first personal computer) and the Internet revolution.
Today, the company is the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, employing approximately 79,800 people, with 55 percent of those employees in the United States. The company’s net revenue in 2009 was $35 billion.
Intel also has a history of developing programs and practices to deal with Information Overload issues for well over a decade. The company’s efforts were led by Nathan Zeldes, who, in 1995, as an IT staff member for Intel in Israel, started developing what he refers to as “first-generation solutions” to deal with the problem of e-mail overload. Zeldes traces his work on Information Overload issues to the introduction of IBM PCs to the workplace. The presence and use of the computers quickly created multiple new and unforeseen problems, including that of Information Overload.
Intel’s internal research indicated that each knowledge worker lost approximately eight hours per week due to Information Overload, which for a company its size resulted in a cost of $1 billion per year.
Recent Information Overload Initiatives
By 2006, Zeldes had discovered, through internal Intel surveys, ...
