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Intel's quiet but passionate boss

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 7 Apr 08, 22:45 GMT

So who are the three most powerful figures in the technology industry right now? How about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Paul Otellini.

"Paul Who?" I hear you cry and you'd be right because Mr Otellini has nothing like the visibility of either of the other two.

He is a rather grey, managerial figure - compared with the uber-geek Gates or the charismatic and slightly scary Jobs.

But if you believe that is what has driven the growth of the entire computing industry in the last three decades and that Intel has been at the forefront of applying the logic of the law, then Mr O is a pretty important guy.

So we were pleased that Intel's chief executive agreed to , viewers and listeners.

And when we met in a rather nondescript hotel room in London's docklands, I found he had plenty of interesting views about our technological future, coupled with a touching fervour about his company.

For unlike Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who have built their companies in their own image, Mr Otellini has been built by Intel, a company he joined 34 years ago.

It's a business with a more conservative culture than is typical of the technology industry, so it was no surprise that its chief executive arrived for our interview in in a grey suit and tie, rather than the black sweater or open-necked shirt favoured by many of his peers.

We had half an hour - he had just been in one long client meeting and went straight out after our allotted time into another.

He arrived carrying with him a small capsule which summed up what he wanted to say about Intel. It contained a thousand of the new Atom chips (Mr Otellini said someone had been asked to count them into the jar), processors designed to power the mobile internet devices Intel believes are the Next Big Thing.

The Atom will compete with the low-power chips made by ARM, currently dominating the smartphone market, and it's by no certain that Intel will win this battle.

Mr Otellini, who has seen Intel extend its lead over AMD after faltering a few years back, knows that this is an industry where, in the words of one of his more colourful predecessors, "only the paranoid survive."

So he wanted to push the message that, whatever the charges that Intel is an arrogant monopoly, this is an industry where constant and rapid innovation can turn a winner into an also-ran every 18 months.

Mind you, Paul Otellini didn't seem too paranoid - except about my suggestion that he try switching off his Blackberry for an hour or so and letting the e-mails pile up.

He seemed slightly puzzled by the sheer range of questions - from the Nigerian who wanted to know why the Classmate project wasn't moving more quickly, to the Iraqi who wanted to know what Wimax would offer his country, to the man from Northampton who wanted to know why a PC can't be turned on and off like a television .

But he handled them all with aplomb, showing just a modicum of irritation when I brought up Nicholas Negroponte's charge that Intel had acted in bad faith when it pulled out of the project.

And his final answer showed that beneath the grey suit and measured words, Paul Otellini can be passionate about the company where he has spent more than half of his life: "It's not often that a corporation can say with legitimacy that I've changed the world, because of what I do the world is a better and different place. Where would the world be without what Intel has built?"

And with that, he picked up his briefcase and his capsule of Atoms, and hurried off into another client meeting.

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Yahoo to Microsoft - back off Ballmer...

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 7 Apr 08, 14:04 GMT

Great news. After two months of tedium, the Microsoft/Yahoo battle has caught fire again. On Saturday, Steve Ballmer wrote to Jerry Yang and his Yahoo board threatening all sorts of mayhem if they didn't agree a deal within three weeks.

Now - and despite the "Dear Steve" and the "very truly yours", this is anything but a cordial reply. The letter makes it clear that substantial negotiations have been going on between the two sides but says Microsoft "mischaracterises the nature of our discussions with you". And it gets pretty personal, addressing Mr Ballmer directly on the issue of who is to blame that those talks have stalled: "Steve, you personally attended two of these meetings and could have advanced discussions in any way you saw fit."

But the most wounding jab relates to Mr Ballmer's suggestion that the economic climate has worsened for internet companies over the last two months. "Not for us, mate, though it's not looking too brilliant for you" is the underlying message in a letter which points out that Microsoft's falling share price has cut the value of its bid.

Yahoo's board is saying it can play hardball with Ballmer - and is confident that it has the backing of its shareholders. What it still needs to prove to those investors is that it has a way of making their shares worth more than Microsoft is offering - either by extracting a higher bid, selling to someone else or continuing to grow Yahoo as an independent company. Watch the share price over the coming days for any clues about the outcome of this battle. Right now it does not tell a story of a company which can expect a higher bid to come along.

So what are Jerry Yang and his fellow directors up to? The best guess must be that they are betting that they can still persuade Microsoft to up its bid. But what started as a slow-moving and supposedly "friendly" game of corporate chess has now become a high-stakes poker game with no love lost on either side.

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