At the end of 1979, a district sales manager in New York sent Intel’s headquarters an eight-page telex. Bill Davidow, who ran Intel’s microcomputer systems division, remembered the gist: the field is depressed, we’re losing business everywhere, there’s no way we can win with this product.
The product was the 8086, Intel’s 16-bit microprocessor. Programmers preferred Motorola’s 68000, with its flat 32-bit address space. “The programmers loved that,” Dave House, who ran the microprocessor line, said years later. Intel was “commonly coming in third.”
Davidow copied the telex and passed it around the executive staff meeting. He told the microprocessor people they were acting like “a bunch of whipped dogs.” By his account, Andy Grove looked around the room and said to him, “you solve the problem.”
Eight people met for a week, mostly in Intel’s systems headquarters, twelve hours a day. Their conclusion, in House’s words: “we were letting the competition set the rules of the game.” Intel couldn’t win an argument about the chip. It could win one about the whole system: development tools, boards, support chips. So it would stop selling to programmers and start selling to vice presidents of engineering and chief executives.
The company wrote one objective: “Establish the 8086 as the highest performance 16-bit microprocessor family.” Then it needed a count. Someone said 1,000 design wins, customers committing to build the chip into their products. “It seemed like an enormous number,” House recalled. It became 2,000.
Each salesperson got a quota of roughly one design win a month, about three times the old rate. Hit it, and help your district hit it, and you and your partner went to Tahiti. Halfway through, the organizers started mailing Tahiti brochures to the salespeople’s spouses and partners, “to pressure them to pressure their salesperson.”
The war room was a single cubicle. In it hung a map eight feet wide, and pushpins went in: one color for seminars, another for design wins. By midsummer 1980, the map was filling. Jeff Katz, who ran the program’s weekly meetings, counted something over 2,300 design wins by the end. Intel’s own history says around 2,500. Katz said about 98 percent of the sales force went to Tahiti, and the factory staff who had been promised a place stayed home because the budget had run out.
Intel’s history later named IBM’s choice of the 8088, a cheaper variant of the 8086, for its first personal computer as the campaign’s most important win; House said in 2013 he didn’t know of a direct link.
Then the quarterly reviews began. “Where’s all of the money from these design wins?” the executives kept asking. The chips were still being designed into customers’ products. Katz had a map full of pins and no revenue to show for them. By his account, the question kept coming until IBM PC clones reached the market in 1983 or 1984.