in the company. These processors were inside computer products priced from hundreds of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars per system. Processor design houses located in Endicott, Kingston, and Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as Rochester, Minnesota, and Boeblegen, Germany, fought to carve off a piece of the pie and cover the broad range of computing power and cost. Each group, seriously handicapped by the “not invented here” syndrome, wanted to design processors in their own unique way while they created and protected their market niche. Eventually, market demands dictated lower volumes for these mainframes, forcing IBM to cut back on the number of processor designs they could support. This resulted in massive layoffs at some of the company’s oldest established sites, from Endicott and Kingston, New York, to Rochester, Minnesota. Politics, not engineering, drove many of those decisions. The loudest and most aggressive leaders typically won.
At the end of the turf wars, the IBM locations that continued to own major processor design work could justify hiring and maintaining a large engineering staff. Those locations that did not own a major mission were forced to downsize. It was survival of the fittest. With job security in mind, I had jumped at the chance to escape Endicott and move to Austin, which soon became IBM’s center of competence for processor design. Lucky I made the jump when I did. While Endicott entered a long period of instability, Austin was able to continue to hire and sustain jobs for the best and brightest.
Based on my previous experience at IBM, I realized what a prize the PlayStation 3 would be for the owning engineering organization. That organization could justify their existence for years to come, and I could see why Kahle would fight tooth and nail to secure this highly coveted processor design.
Dominique Fitzgerald, a diminutive French woman who served as an executive administrative assistant, interrupted our discussion to inform me that my presence was required in the office of Dr. Chekib Akrout, the vice president in charge of entertainment and embedded processors. Akrout took the reins from Kahle as IBM’s business director for the STI Design Center when Kahle moved into the chief engineer’s slot. Dominique ushered me into the executive office next door, then quietly ducked out.
Akrout immediately stood and walked around the desk to greet me with a firm handshake and a ready smile bracketed by deep dimples. We settled into our seats, one on either side of the big maple desk. My new boss looked much younger than I had expected, probably barely forty. He was well over six feet tall, rather large boned, and dressed in trendy brown slacks and a tan long-sleeved shirt that looked classy and expensive but still casual enough to blend into a blue-jean culture. He spoke with a heavy French accent, but his black hair, olive skin, and dark brown eyes made me think of Greece, or Italy, or somewhere in the Middle East.
“I’ve heard good things about you,” he said.
As the discussion progressed, we became instant friends, sharing a similar sense of humor and a mutual respect for each other’s technical ability. We quickly veered off a discussion about the project and launched into a friendly exchange of personal histories. Born in Tunisia, Akrout received a B.S. in physics and two Ph.Ds (electronics and physics) from the Université Pierre & Marie Curie in France. Astonishingly, he was fluent in no less than five very dissimilar languages.
Dominique poked her head into the office to announce that Akrout’s wife was on the phone. I offered to step out for a moment to give him some privacy, but Akrout motioned for me to remain seated. He carried on a short rapid-fire phone conversation in French. I smiled and relaxed, realizing that his mastery of foreign languages provided all the privacy Akrout needed. When he hung up, he picked up his conversation with me, hardly missing a beat.
Akrout started his IBM career in 1982 as a circuit designer in the elite high-speed memory design group. These folks designed memory chips that were much faster than the standard memory chips attached to most PCs. They laid down intricate patterns of millions of transistors, leading edge work that tapped technical skills as well as artistic talent. Akrout showed a flair for management and far-reaching technical and administrative acumen, overseeing a technical smorgasbord that included everything from general-purpose microprocessors to application-specific chips to complex mixed analog/digital designs. In 2000, as director of high-speed and broadband microprocessor development at IBM’s Microelectronics Division, Akrout managed the development of PowerPC processors for Apple’s Macintosh desktops and for Nintendo’s GameCube. In 2001, his role expanded to include responsibility for the entire STI Design Center. He was a star, and the Design Center was lucky to have him.
A man of great charisma and technical depth, Akrout inspired trust both from his own team and from the heads of other companies who wanted to do business with IBM. He was well liked and trusted by the Japanese directors within the Design Center, certainly a big advantage for IBM. Like Sony’s Kutaragi, Akrout was a visionary, willing to take significant business risks. He was a breath of fresh air in the executive ranks, very unassuming and approachable, always focused on doing the “right thing” for IBM. I was generally unimpressed with IBM’s new executive management chain, but Akrout was different. He had the perfect mixture of technical ability and people skills.
Other than the one phone call he took from his wife, Akrout gave me his complete and undivided attention during the afternoon. It didn’t seem to be special treatment, either; I think he treated anyone who came to his office with the same focused attention. When he listened, he listened with everything in him. His positive energy raised the bar on any conversation.
As I left Akrout’s office, I checked the time. The hours had flown by, and I was late to pick up my two sons. I rushed to gather up my laptop, and then zoomed out of the building.
I raced south down Mopac Highway toward my sons’ school, but Austin’s daily traffic snarl brought me to an abrupt halt. Taillights lined the highway as far as I could see. While I crept along, my thoughts turned to the enormous task that lay ahead of us. Akrout was unmatched in charisma and optimism, but could he convince this team, one not even completely formed yet, that they could be successful where no others had been? Would this kind and jovial man be strong enough to lock horns with Sony and Toshiba when tough calls landed on the doorstep, as they undoubtedly would? And what about the executive team above? Akrout had a grand vision for the future of this product within IBM, but I knew it would be a hard sell to the server-centric, conservative decision makers above us. Those powerful executives remained focused on the IBM server and mainframe computer systems that claimed the highest revenue. They were not interested in the emerging low-end computer space belonging to the PC and the game machine. I smiled. Worried or not, I liked this kind of challenge. I looked forward to being on Akrout’s team and to being IBM’s rebellious stepchild once again.
I looked at the bumper-to-bumper cars around me. A huge number of those drivers were involved in one way or another in Austin’s booming high-tech industry. IBM, Motorola, Dell, Sun, AMD, Applied Materials, Samsung, Solectron, National Instruments, 3M, and a host of smaller businesses called Austin home. With the momentum of all these high-tech companies, Austin was becoming a smaller version of the oft-publicized “Silicon Valley” in California. We called our town “Silicon Hills.” Big things were happening in computer chips all over and Austin was right in the thick of the action. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, or maybe a chicken-and-egg scenario. Did the high-tech companies come to Austin because of low tax and economic considerations found in Texas, and then the engineers followed? Or did the growing pool of engineers draw the companies here by offering the necessary resources for corporate or project growth? With the prestigious University of Texas here, a steady stream of new graduates were readily available to infuse fresh ideas and new learning into the creative process.
Computer chips were an integral part of nearly every facet of life in the civilized world, from home appliances to automobiles, cell phones to soda machines, TVs to pacemakers. Technological advances arrived at hypersonic speed, making most electronic devices obsolete within just a couple of years. Demand for the latest and greatest digital gadget was unprecedented. Austin was a high-tech oasis, ideally positioned to take advantage
