Foundation Capital Bets On Intel's Vulnerability
Foundation Capital's Rich Redelfs competed against Intel for years before he became a venture capitalist, most recently as the CEO of Atheros Communications, a Foundation portfolio company that makes wireless semiconductors. He thinks Intel's monopoly, along with the Microsoft-Intel duopoly, is finally eroding for good, and he's investing accordingly. The software of choice for servers isn't Windows anymore, he says -- it's the open-source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP) -- and when Intel processors aren't running Windows, they have to compete on performance like everybody else. The same goes for Intel in netbooks, which started out running Linux. More specialized processors that are not made by Intel are also going into PCs to handle digital cameras, audio and video, Redelfs explains, "and that hurts Intel because they'd rather have their processor running all the apps."
