“In the four years it took Transmeta to come to market, the
company burned through more than US$100 million and came very close
to disaster, according to gossip around the lunch table.”
“Speaking on condition of strict anonymity, engineers with a
major computer manufacturer said that after years of painstaking
design work, the earliest Transmeta chips were a big performance
disappointment. The engineers would neither confirm nor deny their
company’s plans to build Crusoe devices.”
“They were dogs,” said a Transmeta engineer, who also spoke on
condition of anonymity. “We were in trouble.”