Lou Gerstner is of course chairman of the Carlyle Group. He is the same Lou Gerstner who decided that Microelectronics was absolutely strategic for IBM and that it was strategic because he saw the inevitable shift to PC's becoming a myriad of devices like cell phones, iPods and Blackberry's and therefore the shift from building bigger than a bread box PC's on a factory assembly line to "building" most of the cigarette pack sized "PC's" in the fab.
Compare starting a company like Dell, Michael Dell did not even start in a garage, he started the company out of the trunk of his car, to starting up a company like Freescale where the ante for just one fab is in the $5 billion range and where the typical lead-time for a greenfield fab is three years.
Gerstner knows that Freescale's value is in it's ability to be one of the few players now that the PC paradigm is about to shift. The rest of what is now the PC industry will be like chess pieces on a board, moved around at will by the real players like IBM, Freescale, Samsung, Chartered and AMD, as I stated earlier on this blog
http://www.power.org/blog/?p=61
There undoubtedly is a strategic move in the wings involving AMD and its ability to make SoC's with PowerPC cores. Will Gerstner or Bill Gates now pull the strings on that one? What's Hector Ruiz's role? After all, he once ran what is now Freescale. How does this all fit in with IBM and Freescale having kissed and made up and now are, once again, both strategic partners in Power.org? I would not be surprised to see this strategic Power duo expanding by them also sharing strategic power over the architecture with Sony, Toshiba, Samsung and AMD. Samsung, as the largest worldwide manufacturer of flat screens could become especially strategic for PowerPC on the desktop when that FuturePC is that cigarette pack sized module that plugs into theFuturePC port on the back of a typical flatscreen.
That all aside, I don't see Gerstner agreeing to flipping this investment anytime soon. I don't recall Gerstner ever being fond of Wall Street looking over his shoulders and therefore, in an era of rapidly shifting opportunities, Lou Gerstner will help that investment group make lots of money by playing their cards close their vests. As a consequence, the Power architecture will have added a real trump card.
Henry Keultjes hbkeultjesatearthlinkdotnet
Database Scientifics Project
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