IF anyone can sense the shifting balance of power in the technology industry, it should be Paul Otellini.

Not only has Otellini this year taken over as chief executive of Intel, the world’s largest producer of computer processors, he also sits on the board of Google, the search-engine firm that, many think, poses the greatest threat to Microsoft’s 20-year dominance of the PC business.

With its chips in 80% of the world’s desktop computers, Intel forms the other half of the “Wintel” alliance that has scooped the lion’s share of the profits during the PC era.

But as Otellini starts to make his mark on Intel, the company is facing much the same challenges as Microsoft. Its continuing growth — this year’s revenues will rise by more than 10% to nearly $40 billion (£23 billion) — has failed to lift a share price that has traded sideways for years.

That partly reflects doubts about Intel’s ability to adapt as computing power moves beyond the office desktop and into mobile handsets and the sitting room — markets that may require more specialised and, in some senses, less powerful chips.

Intel’s stranglehold over the PC business has yet to translate into big shares of these newer markets. It even missed out on the contract to supply processors for the Xbox 360, the next generation of Microsoft’s gaming terminal.

Yet on a trip to London last week — his first since becoming chief executive in May — Otellini was sceptical that Google, or anyone else, was about to break the mutually supportive dominance of Intel and Microsoft.

He said: “It’s hard to imagine that for enterprise computing there’s a different model any time soon — [an alternative] to an Intel-based machine running Office. Enterprises are slow to move. There are a lot of applications built around it.”

Microsoft’s Bill Gates has spoken of Google’s “honeymoon period”. Otellini seems to entertain similar doubts about the sustainability of the search-engine company’s share price, which has more than trebled since it floated last year.

“If they’re worth $90 billion, how can we be worth only $145 billion, given our infrastructure?” said Otellini.

Intel employs 93,000 people and invests billions of dollars a year in the “fabs” that churn out its microprocessors. It is on course this year to make profits of almost $9 billion, substantially more than Google (with 4,200 employees) will receive in advertising revenue.

Otellini also shrugged off a suggestion that Google and its flat management culture had anything to teach Intel about innovation. “As any company grows, as you double headcount two, three, four, five years in a row, you get maturity, you get systems, you get bureaucracy, you get lawyers, you get processes,” he said.

“I worked at Intel when we were about as big as Google is now in terms of number of employees. The pace of innovation at Intel has not changed.”