Harold Hughes, tough dating

Harold Hughes, CEO of Rambus Inc., wants the world to love the intellectual property his company has to license. He would like Rambus Inc.'s high speed memory solution, XDR or XDR2 to become the standard. In an interview last week he suggested that the "fight" between Intel and AMD might create an opportunity for Rambus . . . "when you're in a fight, you look at things differently than before. Sometimes, someone's going to take some risks, and who knows what's going to happen."

It is a little tough to get somebody to answer the door when you are suing them (memory manufacturers) for using your intellectual property without permission (SDRAM, DDR1, DDR2, GDDR, etc.) and colluding to eliminate from the market other intellectual property (RDRAM). Harold Hughes, often criticized for sending mixed signals, was quoted this week doing his tough guy act:

We will have an anti-trust case against the major manufacturers. We are privy to a large number of documents that we got as part of the Department of Justice's (DOJ) successful prosecution and there are e-mails that are quite blatant about what they were trying to do and what they did amongst themselves.

There's a reason they have people in prison. They will somehow say that there is a disconnect between their actions on RDRAM and what they did on price setting on SDRAM DDR, and I think a great deal of the evidence will show that they are inextricably linked. For them to raise prices as they did, they first had to knock RDRAM out as a competing part.

It is tough, really tough to make somebody love you or else . . .

Read more about Harold Hughes interview at Webwereld linked here.