On the stage of the Macworld Conference in San Francisco, history was about to be made in January, 2006. One after another, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Intel CEO Paul Otellini stepped onto the stage. That day, Jobs made a historic announcement: from now on, all Mac computers would run on Intel processors.
One day in 1992, Intel researcher John Carruthers approached the company’s CEO, Andy Grove, with a strange request. He asked for $200 million in funding to research a technology that no one was sure would even work. The technology was called Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography—an ultra-precise process of etching electronic circuits onto silicon.
In 1987, two very different dreams were born in Asia. In Taiwan, Morris Chang set his sights on building a company called TSMC that would manufacture the world’s best chips. At the same time, in Shenzhen, China, Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei—a small business that purchased cheap telecom equipment from Hong Kong and sold it in the Chinese market.
One afternoon in 1985, Taiwan’s influential minister K.T. Li invited Morris Chang to his office. Nearly two decades earlier, it was Li who had persuaded Texas Instruments to set up the first chip factory in Taiwan.
US F-117 bombers took off silently from an air base in Saudi Arabia at the dawn of January 17, 1991. The target was Baghdad.
Lee Byung-chul was an individual with natural, innate traits for entrepreneurship. He had a magical aura in dealing with business— he was successful in whatever business he took up. In 1938, when the drums of war were rolling out all around, and Korea was under Japanese rule and at war with China, he started his dream company, Samsung.