Intel President Andy Grove was a dynamic individual and he had true stories of hard work. He was a refugee from Hungary who had fled the Soviets and the Nazis. Timidity and discipline were his main mantras in running a business. In his famous book 'Only the Paranoid Survive', he wrote: "Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, and fear of failure - these are powerful motivators for people to move forward."
On a chilly evening in Palo Alto (a city in California), three legends of the American chip industry—Bob Noyce, Jerry Sanders, and Charlie Spork—gathered in the warm atmosphere of Ming's Chinese Restaurant. Although they once worked shoulder to shoulder at Fairchild Semiconductor, they later became rivals as CEOs of their own companies. But that evening, they had a common as well as massive challenge in front of them: the irresistible rise of Japan. So they agreed that they could no longer remain indifferent to the government's stance; this time they had to approach the government.
AMD CEO Jerry Sanders entered the chip business belligerently, especially against his old rival Intel. But in the 1980s, instead of Intel, Japan became his new and even more formidable rival.
America's semiconductor industry, once the pride of Silicon Valley, suddenly found itself in the midst of fierce competition in the 1980s. Japanese companies were surging like an irresistible wave. One silent but important hero in this story was Hewlett-Packard (HP) executive Richard Anderson. He set strict criteria for which memory chips HP would buy. Therefore, the fate of semiconductor vendors depended on his decisions.
In 1968, student protests in Berkeley and communist unrest in Beijing shook the world. Meanwhile, the Palo Alto Times published a small but groundbreaking piece of news titled "Founders leave Fairchild: Build their electronics company."
Two top executives of the US Texas Instruments Company—Mark Shepherd and Maurice Chang—flew to Taiwan in 1968. Their goal was to find a suitable location for a new factory for chip assembly.