FPI Director Dan Senor: Intel and the Israelis

Four guys are standing on a street corner...an American, a Russian, a Chinese man, and an Israeli.... A reporter comes up to the group and says to them: “Excuse me....What’s your opinion on the meat shortage?” The American says: What’s a shortage? The Russian says: What’s meat? The Chinese man says: What’s an opinion? The Israeli says: What’s “Excuse me”? —Mike Leigh, Two Thousand Years We did it the Israeli way; we argued our case to death.” That’s how Shmuel “Mooly” Eden sums up a months-long showdown between senior executives of the high-tech firm that gave Silicon Valley its name and an upstart group of the firm’s employees working in an outpost in Haifa. As it turns out, the survival and future prosperity of Intel, the computer-chip manufacturer, would turn on the outcome. But the fierce internecine dispute was about more than just Intel; it would determine whether the ubiquitous laptop computer—so much taken for granted today—would ever exist.

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