The
man who sees tomorrow
Staff
reports
Cave
Creek resident Dean McCarron doesn’t use a crystal
ball, tarot cards or a Ouija board to predict
the future.
Instead,
the proverbial “shape of things to come” is
delivered twice each month to his Schoolhouse
Road home office.
The
40‑year‑old McCarron is president
of Mercury Research. His job is to test new
computer products and components months before
they reach consumers. Nearly every electronic
product that uses a computer processor chip
crosses his desk for testing and analysis.
The
self‑taught college dropout now counts
the top five computer chip makers as his clients,
among them Intel and AMD. In addition, McCarron
has become a media darling–a Google search of
his name turns up tens of thousands of hits.
Plus, he’s considered the news media’s go‑to
guy when it comes to industry analysis. McCarron
was quoted in a California newspaper story last
week about Intel’s new quad‑core chips.
“Its
kind of strange because I’m fairly introverted.
The media thing emerged because of the
work,” McCarron told The Desert Advocate.
He
estimates he’ll get 10‑20 calls from the
news media per day when high‑tech companies
announce they’ve got a new product coming out.
A
Phoenix native, McCarron studied engineering
at the University of Arizona and dropped out
in his sophomore year. A soft‑spoken man,
McCarron said he developed his technology expertise
on his own. “A lot of it has been through osmosis,”
he said.
At
age 16 he won a computer programming contest
sponsored by Honeywell International. He immediately
went to work as a intern for the technology
giant. McCarron jokes that he had to wait until
he was 16 to accept the internship in order
to be able to drive to work.
McCarron
later became a software writer for a Scottsdale‑based
high‑tech firm before cofounding Mercury
Research in 1994. He bought out his partner
in 2001.
The
technical aspect of his work–studying and testing
components–is actually a small portion of the
work, he said. Most of what he does is forecasting
sales and prices.
“The
people who get my products care a lot more about
the statistics than the technology,” he
explained.
The
average cost of a new personal computer these
days hovers between $700 and $800.
Consumers
are, for the most part, getting the best bang
for their buck given the pace at which technology
moves, McCarron opined.
Citing
what is known as Moore’s Law, he said “technology’s
performance doubles every 18
months.”
Moore’s
Law is named after Gordon Moore, one of Intel’s
cofounders.
