Information deluge

Rare are people who have had the privilege of not using a PC, and not using Intel in today's knowledge economy. All of us have been touched, if not compellingly controlled, by the PC - Intel Inside. Today's world economy, I assume, would look very different had there been no Intel. Ubiquity and uniqueness have come together under this phenomenal name. Lastly, we know Intel would have looked very different today even if it did exist, had there been no Andy Grove!

I assume when people see a computer with the "Intel Inside" sticker, they figure "Intel Inside" must be a good thing. Intel Inside was a good thing, and probably the biggest landscape-altering thing to happen to the PC industry. Intel was the first standard backbone that other hardware and software vendors could count on for consistency. At the back of it, ironically, was this constantly reinventing chameleon called Andy Grove alias Andras Istvan Gróf. This book attempts to unravel him.

His story, The Life and Times of an American, is a story-book fairy-tale""from the fatelessness of war-hit-Hungary to the cover of Time, and naturally makes for a riveting read. The author has tried to make it one of the most comprehensive texts on Grove currently available, and he mostly succeeds.

The first thing that strikes as one picks up this book is the sheer size of it. Tedlow is a business historian and academic; and the book reads like a research script at times. Extensive research has clearly gone into this work, and to the average reader, this book will prove to be a one-point ready-reckoner of sorts. Not just Andy, but everything around him, from the World Wars to the Silicon Valley revolution, has been neatly documented and precisely outlined. Finally, Intel's journey from what it began to what it is today has been noted year-by-year. It is rich in detail, if not so much in flow. It is extremely informative, if not consistently interesting, and comprehensive, if not compelling.

The book works on multiple levels. It gives us a comprehensive compendium on Andy Grove. Finally, the book covers fascinating chapters of PC history right from CISC, RISC, the birth of the 'Intel Inside' campaign, the PowerPC, the Pentium bug that introduced Intel to the Internet, and so on, right up to the dot-com bust. Author Tedlow has extensively interviewed Grove, Intel CEOs Gordon Moore, Craig Barrett and Paul Otellini, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and others. Between some of these people, the history of modern computing""and thus the modern economy and the world as we see it""was made.

The book talks about peculiar qualities of this enigmatic person, like his "wilful insensitivity" his "natural optimism", his appetite for risk and persistent insistence on success. It meticulously explains his battles, from scarlet fever to anti-Semitism to prostate to Parkinson's and in parallel Intel's struggles from the memory market to the 386 to the OS/2 to the dot-com bust. Through it all, there is a deep analysis of all the contradiction and confusion that makes Andy Grove what he is. It works because it analyses both the person and the persona. It works also because, like Robert Payne in Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, it accepts "great" as finally "human".

At the end of the 568 pages, however, the author concedes what the reader realises""that Andy still remains a mystery.

If the book doesn't work at times, it is because of the length and pace. We live in harried times. Andy Grove is an already-famous-and-much-written-about person and for people who are familiar with some of many other books and biographies on Andy Grove or Intel, it can get slow at times. The book takes the reader through, painstakingly, each detail on Andy that Tedlow has taken the pains to collect. It is definitely not a book that could be gone through on a flight. It is more like a book one regularly needs to come back to, to read a few sections at a time. The book unfortunately begins to make sense only when read in a flow.

The bottom line is that this book may or may not work for the reader, depending on his viewpoint. The Life and Times of an American is a treasure-trove of information. It may also be great for historical purposes, and for people who haven't really followed the computing industry when it was happening. But it is not for the pressed-for-time people, who are keen on just getting a keen, cutting insight into what made Andy Grove tick.

The author is chairman & CEO, HCL Infosystems Ltd

ANDY GROVE
The Life and Times of an American

Richard S Tedlow
Penguin Portfolio
Price: Rs 695; Pages: 568