Yesterday’s Mercury News has all but written off Transmeta, at one time the Darling of the Valley.
Transmeta — how a great idea, brilliant minds and big investors equaled a big flop.
The Merc expects Transmeta to quit the business of selling processors, after several years of unsuccessfully trying to compete with Intel.
Instead, they’ll focus on their IP business … and probably lay off half their employees.
But all is not lost. Their radical ideas will undoubtably live on in later, successful ventures.
“The most innovative companies rarely succeed,” said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future. “But Silicon Valley is built on the rubble of failure, not on the spires of success. Their intellectual property will get recycled by the valley and continue to move it forward.”
I’m sure that’s a big comfort to all those workers about to get “recycled” in the valley.
[...] Silicon Valley is known for “noble failures” – those companies that aim for the stars, run out of fuel, and end up as large smoking craters in the ground. Take Transmeta – please! A year and a half after they stopped making chips, Transmeta is suing Intel for violating its low-power patents. One of the patents in the suit covers “adaptive power control,’’ which changes the speed of a microprocessor on the fly to adapt to usage and power needs. Transmeta applied for that patent in January 2000 and received it in August, said John O’Hara Horsley, general counsel for Transmeta. He said Intel’s SpeedStep technology, which throttles back a computer’s performance to conserve power, appears to violate the Transmeta patent. Under patent law, the filing date for a patent application determines who came up with an invention first. [...]