It really struck home that Intel is/has "Balkanized"into our own technology niches with communication across the niches becoming "most difficult".    It is interesting at how much of a "multi-lingual"company we have become! 

For example, I have commented in previous Mocha's about the need to drive up the value stack and encompass s/w.  I believe I have a pretty very clear image of what this means in terms of products, s/w implementation, architecture, distribution alternatives, support issues and the like.  When I discuss this with others, I rapidly realize that the words I am using have little context relevance to then... and like the people in the study on business communication, the gap was ignored until "it became important".    I can only conjecture that my words must have really been a kind of "gibbish"that they politely allowed to pass while key words are identified for a response!

More recently, I brought up the notion that the notion that www.intel.com was or potentially could be a major web Portal and we needed to take better advantage of it.  The people I was talking with were very confused:we *couldn't* be a portal, that was Yahoo or Netscape.  Further discussion revealed that their definition of "web Portal"seem to be "Yahoo or Netscape"with little further understanding or insight into it.

Disruptive Technology:Need The Vocabulary

I view it as very major problem when the key elements of innovations and disruptive technologies are only understood as "buzz words".    I have no idea how we can drive our businesses forward when the new opportunities and environmental factors are not part of our intellectual tool set or vocabulary.  How do we recognize technological opportunities and mesh them into our business portfolio if we can't envision what they mean or how we would use them?   How do we avoid "no one would want a computer in their home"myopia?

I don't really know what the solution would be other than it *must* reduce complexity!
I do not now believe we will have a significant number of people that can bridge the full spectrum of the Intel technology "nations":process technology and device physics, circuit and microarchitecture, system on a chip and motherboard, bios, HAL, O/S, applications, human interface, web centricity, e-commerce, security, wireless connectivity, etc, etc, etc. 
I didn't even touch on the non-technical product and marketing issues.

It Means What I Know It To Mean

We have to remember, that within each technological "Balkan state", that they will follow the memorable words of  Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:
       "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."