CNN 20: Bad Pentium Chips, December 20, 1994
STEVE YOUNG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: After a lot of equivocating, the world's biggest chip maker said it would replace its Pentium chip, which had a very subtle bug in it. Intel perceived it as an engineering problem, and provided an engineer to discuss it in dry, desiccated, academic terms. And later, the CEO, Andy Grove, said, in writing about it, that Intel blew it. He said that they failed to understand that, in popularizing technology, they had become a consumer company and they had not been acting like a consumer company. They had to set aside more than $400 million in a charge to pay for the cost of the chips. Intel suffered a much greater public relations blemish. But it has learned since, and it has been much more open about posting what they call errata, which is the dry desiccated term for screwups in chips. And they've been getting high marks since for their improved consumer-friendly policies. Intel, today, really is struggling with some of the same issues that Microsoft is and other technologists. That is, are we entering the post-PC era? Because Intel built its whole business model, or at least in the last five, 10 years, on PCs. But still they are a towering powerhouse in technology.