One sign that Intel is having trouble dancing to technology"s current beat may be the world"s most expensive disco ball.
For a company holiday party next month, a handful of engineers assembled a disco ball--with hundreds of small reflective devices--to hang above the dance floor. The mirrors are leftover projection-television chips from Intel"s planned effort to enter the digital television market--an effort the company recently abandoned only 10 months after a splashy introduction at the Consumer Electronics Show last January.
The TV effort became yet another in a series of embarrassing stumbles for Intel. The company has publicly canceled a succession of high-profile projects, has replaced managers in money-losing ventures and has fallen behind its keen competitor Advanced Micro Devices in introducing technologies, like a feature that wards off viruses and worms, in markets that Intel has long dominated.