(ES) Creating business with 10X change.

Gordon Moore, of the Moore's Law fame, writes about his experience of creating a breakthrough technologies at Intel,

...at the time the first microprocessors were shipped, the total annual market for computers in the world was something like 10,000 units. The microprocessor would have been a commercial disaster if all we did was to replace those 10,000 units with cheaper processors.

I remember going to a conference and speaking before a group that was more involved in applications than devices and explaining to them that we had to ask big questions, like, ‘ How are we going to develop markets that can use 100,000 of these a month?’ (While one hundred thousand a month doesn’t seem like many now when compared to the tens of millions shipped currently, it sure did then.) Ted’s insight and the Fairchild experience with ICs helped us understand that this product had countless uses, but we also understood our efforts alone would build volume markets.

 To summarize, the goal was to create a market that could absorb 10 times more units shipped in a ten times shorter period of time. It's likely that Andy Grove's notion of a 10X change comes from the same early days at Intel.

Source: SIEPR Discussion Paper No. 00-45. Gordon Moore, Kevin Davis. Learning the Silicon Valley Way. Stanford University, 2001.

tags: 10X, 4q diagram, business, breakthrough