Intel held its spring analysts' meeting yesterday afternoon in New York and rolled out a gaggle of senior execs to outline its plans ahead. Those execs included chairman Andy Grove, CEO Craig Barrett and VPs Sean Maloney, Mark Christensen, Paul Otellini, and Gerry Parker. Barrett said: "We're still looking at a billion computers connected together...worth trillions of dollars. He said by the year 2002 the e-commerce market in the US will be worth $800 billion. He said Intel will sell half of its products through the Internet this year. "The exponential growth here is a huge opportunity. Our goal is to be a building block supplier." That would apply to clients, servers and services, he said. "Intel's intent in the client platform is to have the most compelling platform for Internet access." Those included set top boxes and PCs. He said the Celeron processor was making "good progress" and Intel was aggressively driving the price down. At the very low end, whether it be pager computers or PDAs, Intel was actively pursuing all architectures, including x.86 and StrongARM. He said Intel would introduce details of its StrongARM family's direction early next month. "We are now in production at .18 micron technology and we'll ship our first products this quarter. This will rapidly ramp up to the year 2000." He said the .18 micron technology means Intel will have Gigahertz products next year, rather than the demos it had shown this year. ®