Giant Intel Corp., which launched a massive consumer advertising campaign several years ago to make its Pentium computer chip a household name, has succeeded -- but not the way it wanted. Recently the chip was found to be defective when used in certain applications. The news flashed across the Internet, the electronic bulletin board used by thousands of researchers around the world, and the company suddenly was besieged with demands to recall this key component in millions of personal computers.
Then IBM, which uses the Pentium chip in a small number of its PCs, announced it would stop shipping orders for computers with the defective chip. The move set off a fierce dispute over the seriousness of the flaw, with IBM claiming its calculations showed the chip would produce errors in spreadsheet programs at an unacceptable rate; Intel said the chip performed essentially as advertised in all but a limited number of arcane mathematical operations.
Intel may be correct, but the episode shows that Intel has a serious attitude problem that could end up costing it dearly. Rather than simply acknowledge the problem directly and offering to exchange any defective chip, the company stonewalled.
Industry analysts say it is most unlikely that large numbers of users actually would go to the trouble of replacing their chips. But apparently fearful that millions of non-technical computer users might ask for the modification, Intel adopted a policy of demanding that users demonstrate their work is of a nature that could encounter the flaw before agreeing to provide a new chip.
This brutish behavior has turned into a public relations disaster for Intel. The company looks arrogant and out of touch with millions of its customers who are not computer experts but rely on the company's reputation for quality and reliability. Every PC routinely performs millions of calculations an hour, most of which the user is completely unaware of. Since the average consumer doesn't know enough about microprocessor chips to judge on )) his or her own whether something is a problem, the burden is on the manufacturer to go all out to win the consumer's confidence. The uproar over this flawed Pentium chip shows that Intel, which prides itself on its technical expertise, still has a lot to learn about the higher demands that come from entering the mass consumer market.