Intel exec on the future of Net, computing

Sean Maloney, a senior vice president of Intel and director of the Sales and Marketing Group, has been with Intel since 1982, filling a variety of rolls in various countries.

He's had a front-row seat

at the Internet revolution. Here he talks about an array of subjects, including how he learned the hard way about the information-spreading power of the Internet, the future of e-commerce, information overload, the rise of browsers, security, and other topics.

Q: Tell us a bit about your background:
Sean Maloney: In the early '80s, I was a kind of incurable college dropout. I was very, very interested in software and ended up working on large mainframe systems when I was in my early 20s. I had written a paper on how you could do some stuff on mainframes using Intel memory technology. And anyway, Intel came and approached me. I started off as one of the very few employees in Europe who did anything on software.

Years and years and years later I found myself working for Andy [Grove]. I was his technical assistant in September of '94. I had been working for him for a couple of years and we then went through one of the most public baptisms of fire in the Internet. [The Pentium bug.] It was an astonishing experience to go through, because you realized that there was this huge medium that was growing very, very rapidly that had the power to get ideas across to large numbers of people very, very quickly. And whether the ideas were wrong or false, it didn't matter. They could be put across very, very quickly. I ended up kind of running that activity for Intel, which ended up with our Intel.com staff.

Q: When you started looking at the Pentium bug when did you begin to realize that it had legs of its own? At first, was Intel saying: "Well, it's a problem that's not going to affect everybody?"
A: We knew fairly quickly that this was very, very unusual, because we had had plenty of errata [bugs] in processors before. There's always been errata. This is the first time anyone in the consumer space cared about it and this is an exceedingly minor bug. Yet somehow this had become huge and consumerized.

But that was kind of less interesting in a lot of ways than when we realized that the Internet was a critical factor in forming opinions and spreading information. It was when we started seeing journalists and CNN starting to reference stuff seen on Usenet because none of the mass journalists really up to that point had a clue what Usenet was. And they never looked at the Net. Go back four years--there were no browsers. Most journalists quite literally didn't have a PC, let alone have Internet access. And suddenly we realized that this medium was full of opinions, one order, two orders of magnitude faster than any medium had done before.

Our immediate lesson was from that moment onwards, you cannot ignore that medium and that that medium was going to get more and more important at setting opinions. And so we started to behave accordingly.

Q: How pervasive is the Internet now?
A: Most big businesses in almost any industry whatsoever, their information technologies now are completely driven and dominated by Internet issues. I was with a roundtable of CIOs the other day from a sprinkling of America's largest companies--and almost all of them were spending more than 50 percent of their time on Internet-related issues.

Q: What are some of the main issues? Is it Y2K related?
A: No. The first issue is...I'll give them at random, actually. The first issue is supply line integration, integration backwards and forward, outwards to your customers and backwards to your suppliers.

The second issue is that the top executives of top American companies now start the day by hitting the Net. They get their e-mails and then they want to know what's going on with their competition on the Internet. And so everybody now does general market research, market information, whether you're a CIO, CEO, CFO, on the Internet. Everyone goes off and hits the medium...from 7 till 9, wham, there's all this Net traffic. So it's an opinion setter internally and externally.

Q: Where will most of the development in e-commerce occur?
A: The thing with consumer-related e-commerce is that you hit a natural limit. You are not going to get 100 percent of the people buying books on the Web. We're going to hit a certain behavioral limit, at which point people like going to bookstores or they like browsing in CD stores or they like buying their food in Safeways or whatever. That doesn't apply to business-to-business e-commerce. Business-to-business e-commerce will go to 100 percent, or approximately to 100 percent, because it is just a better, faster, cheaper way of doing business.

The analogy with business-to-business e-commerce is the way business toggled from being telex- and first-class-letter-based to being fax-based in the 1980s. It went 100 percent--people threw away the Telex machines. And what's going to happen in business-to-business is that people will throw away the fax machines. In small businesses, large businesses, any business-to-business commerce it is just better to do it on e-commerce. Will it take three years, four years, five years? I don't know, but it's everywhere--it's in every country in the world. In every geography the same thing is happening.