Interview: Intel's Don MacDonald talks Centrino

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 26 Sep 2003 at 16:54

Where does the codename Sonoma come from? I know Microsoft uses the hills around Seattle...

MacDonald: There are a lot of us Brits in the Mobile Group here, so we decided to use names from vineyards, so that we would have an excuse to go and do product planning in various vineyards in California [laughs].

So if you look at the codenames we have, we've got Sonoma, a famous vineyard in this area, Nappa is a very famous vineyard - you get Nappa Valley wines. And Carmel, which was our first Banias platform, is also a wine area, as well as being a nice little town on the coast. We have to pick code names that are meaningless for legal protection reasons. So we just like wines!

Bringing things back to the current state of play, how do you feel the Centrino message has got across to the general public? Are people understanding the 'portability, connectivity' issues, or is there still work to do on that score?

MacDonald: Oh there's heck of a lot more work to do. The good news is that people are buying the product. We've had incredible commercial success with Centrino six months after the launch, so we've been delighted with the way people are buying it.

So we know we that when we preach to the converted - people who have used notebooks, who care about battery life, form factor, weight and performance - that our message resonates with those guys and that is reflected in the number of purchases.

The guys who are buying their first notebook are a very different audience. You don't know that you care about battery life, and if you are a student or a business traveller and you want to use it when you go to your client in London or to a Borders bookstore or wherever you might use a public wireless LAN...

The problem is that you if have never used your first notebook as a mobility product, you're not going to appreciate these things. So unfortunately, that is where we have more work to do. Most people may be tempted to buy a different type of notebook where it won't deliver the benefits of mobility as well as Centrino does. Centrino was designed exclusively for this kind of use.

So you feel the market will naturally evolve towards the Centrino model?

MacDonald: Exactly. The key thing is, you've got to let people taste this. Forget all the marketing fluff - let people use the notebooks, and then they will make their own choice. We're highly confident about this. For example, we placed over 7,000 seed units to corporate buyers, to say 'try it, don't read the specs, don't read the information, just try it'. And we think this has probably been the number one contributor to the commercial success.

The areas which don't come through so well include the performance message. We have fantastic performance in a very power efficient way. One of those ways was to reduce the frequency - we had new ways of getting the performance. And so for a lot of consumers who historically used megahertz in notebooks as a way of associating performance, that's a job that's still undone.

What was interesting today was that we showed the Alien Ware and the Voodoo systems as high-end gaming platforms, where they said they had done their testing and said the best gaming experience on a laptop comes from a Centrino platform. So the message is getting out there, the designs are getting out there. The reviews of magazines and Labs, and obviously users themselves, will help. But it's all part of the plan - it's not going to happen overnight.