Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

This assignment will focus on two highly-regarded Chief Executive Officers (CEO) of the Information Technology (IT) industry; Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Computer Corporation, and Andy Grove, co-founder and former CEO of Intel. We will examine these two giants in the IT world and focus on the following five topics; Key Contributions, Difficulties Encountered, Similarities, Differences, and Success Factors for their Achievements.

Key Contributions

We will examine the key contributions for both Michael Dell and Andy Grove. Michael Dell’s key contribution was creating a “one-to-one relationship” (Krames, 2003, p. 59) with his customers. Michael Dell surrounded his entire business model around the customer and focusing on their needs, Dell knew what the customer needed and desired.

Andy Grove’s key contributions were the memory chip and microprocessor. Early in 1968 when Intel was a young company, Andy Grove and his partners at Intel created the memory chip. This new technology housed transistors on a single chip, which allowed products to run faster without increasing the cost (Krames, 2003). In the late 1980's after leaving the memory chip business, Intel shifted their resources and created the microprocessor. This new technology would elevate Intel status and prominence in the computer world.

Difficulties Encountered

During this section of the paper, we will look at the difficulties encountered by both Michael Dell and Andy Grove, and see how each of them furthered their ideas during those challenging times. Michael Dell’s biggest challenge was a new production line of computers called Olympic. Even though these computers were considered top of the line, Dell forgot one important factor; the customer. The Olympic product line failed because Dell and his staff did not include customer participation, input, and feedback into the product. Dell promised that he would never break away from his business...