As many of Intel's competitors and challengers have learned over the years, never underestimate Dr Andrew Grove, chairman of the company and former chief executive, who visited Dublin this week.
Like many of his generation of technology company leaders, he can be extremely accessible and forthright. The Intel co-founder combines a sense of command with informality, directness with a teacher's ability to explain complex technologies and concepts in a user-friendly way. He still works out of an eight by nine foot cubicle - the same size as every other Intel employee - at company headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
But he's also the man who headed up the company as it acquired a fearsome reputation for steam rolling over competition, operating under paranoid levels of secrecy, and relentlessly pursuing foes, real or perceived, with an army of fastidious lawyers.
Voted Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1997, Dr Grove is a complex man with a complex background - a Hungarian refugee from the Nazis who eventually landed in Fairchild Semiconductor, the fabled Silicon Valley firm that spun off many of the foundation companies of the California technology boom. He left Fairchild to found Intel in 1968 with two other eminent names in technology circles - Mr Gordon Moore and Mr Robert Noyce.
Adopting a role he knows well as professor in Stanford University's graduate business school, Dr Grove took to the podium in Dublin Castle on Monday to expound on business and the Internet. A fluid speaker who retains a clipped Hungarian accent, Dr Grove was clearly most at ease after his talk, when he stepped down off the stage and into the audience to take questions from the floor.
He was similarly relaxed in an interview Monday, where he admitted that stepping down as chief executive has cut back his Intel work week by all of 10 hours, from 50 to 40. He's doing "different things rather than fewer things", he says. Along with teaching at Stanford, he is a "patient advocate" for men with prostate cancer at a San Francisco teaching hospital. Dr Grove successfully fought off the disease himself a few years ago.
He's taught at Stanford for 10 years, and notes a big change in the goals of the students he lectures. Ten years ago, 30 to 40 per cent of them ended up as consultants or in investment banking. "Today, the number one destination for most of them is to go into Internet companies, or starting them," he says. Some have done spectacularly well - Mr Jeff Schull, the founder of auction site eBay, was one of his students.
His message to his students is the same as the one he offered here: companies of the future will all be Internet companies, and will need to combine, adeptly, traditional business wisdom from the bricks-and-mortar world with the fast-paced, evolve-or-die demands of the Internet world of "clicks".
Introducing Dr Grove on Monday, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, mentioned that he'd been listening to some advice from the Intel chairman.
So, what did he say? "I told him the Irish economy has dome phenomenally well, and the consequences of that is often a strain on infrastructure," he says.
He also pointed out that the Republic needed a liberal immigration policy because it needs to have open doors for workers from outside the State to satisfy the hunger for technology workers. Finally, Dr Grove said he expressed some concern at the cost of telecommunications internally within the State, and within Europe. "If you get companies to locate outside Dublin - which has to be the answer (to Dublin's high costs) - you need very low cost company-to-company connections." He says he was "astonished" at the high price of such networks here.
Dr Grove is adamant that the single most crucial factor in whether the Republic can become an international e-commerce centre is not "ballpark projects" - big, government-supported infrastructure initiatives - but the speed at which indigenous Irish companies embrace the Internet as a central part of doing business. "What has to change is a more aggressive attitude by businesses towards utilising the Internet." He notes that Intel itself has had to undergo a mind shift of massive proportions as consumers have embraced cheap PCs, competition and overproduction has battered the market, and income from microprocessors has fallen.
Dr Grove says microprocessors are now only half of Intel's business. Intel has moved aggressively to acquire a range of networking and communications companies - seven in the past year - that will enable the company to offer a full range of services; they have investments in 250 e-commerce companies, and are still shopping for companies.
So, is Intel at a "strategic inflection point" or SIP - Grove's description of a crucial moment of sweeping change for a business, defined in his 1996 book, Only the Paranoid Survive?
"Yes, I think so," he muses. With massive understatement he describes as "interesting" other SIPs, at which Intel "went from being a silicon supplier to a microprocessor supplier to a supplier of the innards of a PC".
And does he long for the simpler, silicon days? "I am a bit of a glutton for new things," he grins. "All of us in the company now have to operate outside our historical comfort zone."
