The Salesman of Silicon Valley

By Chris Taylor

Few companies have an heir apparent as obvious as Paul Otellini. For nearly two years, the chief operating officer of Intel has been sharing the presidency of the company with CEO Craig Barrett, who has been grooming Otellini to take over when he reaches the company's mandatory-retirement age of 65 in 2005. The modest Otellini, 53, eager to avoid any appearance of a coronation, will say only that the top job is "something I'd like to do" and that Intel has a "very orderly transition process."

The fact is, Silicon Valley's top chipmaker would be hard-pressed to find a better-qualified candidate. Otellini has been with Intel since 1974 and once served as technical assistant to the legendary Andy Grove, Barrett's predecessor. Last year, as Intel faced cutthroat competition from rival Advanced Micro Devices in a declining PC market, Otellini sat down with his engineering team, which wanted to make a new microprocessor for laptops. His big idea: since laptop owners add wi-fi cards to their machines so that they can surf the Internet wirelessly at any hot spot, why not build wireless connectivity into the chip itself? The result was the Centrino, which was launched this past March and has already netted Intel $2 billion in revenue--about a third of its quarterly total.

Otellini offers an unusual perspective for his industry: that good marketing makes all the difference. Pushing a distinctive product like Centrino or Pentium, Intel's previous success story, is almost as important to him as the chips themselves. "Our whole job," he says, "is to create demand." He has done just that--including for himself. --By Chris Taylor