Only the paranoid survive

Yesterday night I finished "Only the paranoid survive" by Andrew S. Grove, the CEO of Intel. I had started it a while ago, but due to various reasons had left it half way. The whole book revolves around the concept of strategic inflection points. What are they? Why are they so important? How do you spot one? How do you survive one? Most of it was typical management theory, you know... the usual stuff. The high point of the book was the last chapter: Internet, signal or noise? In this chapter, the author applies all his priciples(theory) to the new concept of the internet. Here the point to note is that, this book was written in 1996, before internet really took off, before the dotnet phenomenon and way before the internet bubble burst. The conclusions he comes out with are bang on! Even in retrospect, this chapter couldn't have been written any better. The experiences and situations that Grove uses are also very interesting and some of them are very suprising! Did you know that Intel was a semiconductor memory company, and that it moved over to microprocessors only when the japanese started kicking there ass in the memory chip market. A good read for anyone interested in the history of the computer hardware/software industry.