The most-trafficked online sources of national and international news, sports, weather and stock quotes aren t necessarily newspaper sites, but the AOLs, Yahoos and Excites of the new online world. Newspapers have allowed companies that were dust three years ago to own the notion of news aggregation on the Web, where as big brands should have been owning that space and we should not be there, said George Bell, CEO of Excite, a leading Internet portal. Grove, a founder of Intel and Time magazine s Man of the Year in 1997, talked about Intel s strategic inflection, in which it went from almost complete market share in the memory chip market to 3 percent or 4 percent share in a matter of a few years. It was a horrendous experience, he said. We should have known a lot earlier.
Nothing sharpens the awareness of a situation like the sight of the gallows.
The sight of the gallows was pretty bad. The way you get people in the tent is being attacked, and what you have inside the tent is being attacked, Grove said. You are where Intel was three years before the roof fell in on us. Enlist objective observers as soon as possible to help avoid destruction, he advised. The thing that bugs me as I look at is why did it take such a horrendous situation for us to deal with something that an objective observer would have seen coming five years earlier, he said.