John Markoff writes today on Intel's mishandling of the Pentium flaw. Mr. T May quoted. For email copy send blank message with subject: 585_999 Here are few excerpts: In recent weeks, evoking memories of Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate crisis, Mr. Grove has retreated to his "war room" inside the company's corporate headquarters in Santa Clara. *** 'Righteousness' How did a sporadic arithmetic error that was not detected for months, in the chip that Intel insists is its most heavily tested microprocessor in history, become the heart of such a debacle? The answer is rooted in Intel's distinctive corporate culture, and suggests that Intel went wrong in much the same way as other big and unresponsive companies before it. Intel has traditionally valued engineering over product marketing. Inward-looking and wary of competitors (from experience with the Japanese), it developed a bunker mentality, a go-for-the-jugular attitude and a reputation for arrogance. "There are certain elements in Intel's culture, and one is righteousness," said Federico Faggin, a former Intel engineer and co-inventor of its first microprocessor. "The attitude at Intel is, 'We're better than everyone else and what we do is right and we never make mistakes.' " *** But the technologist's mind-set did little to prepare Intel for the consumer marketplace. Although it spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its "Intel Inside" and Pentium ad campaigns, the consumer-oriented strategy unraveled last month when Mr. Grove dismissed customers' requests for chips to replace the Pentium. *** "What Intel clearly should have done is issued a bug report as soon as they found out it was a reproducible problem," said Timothy May, a former Intel semiconductor engineer. "Instead, by keeping it mum, they backed themselves into a corner." But although he has issued a public apology for the flaw, Mr. Grove has been unwilling to personally come forward in an effort to restore customer confidence. "The test of a great company is in how they handle disasters," said James F. Moore, head of Geopartners, a high-tech consulting firm. "This is one where you can't behave like a paranoid. This is one where only the compassionate survive."