Dave,
The lost time that I was refering to was the time that got spent developing DDR. Even though Rambus does not make the chips themself, my guess is that if they had lowered their royalty payments, there would have been less drive to develop a competing technology. But of course that is only speculation on my part.
As you have pointed out, Rambus' strategy has been to convince Intel to choose them. This has indeed been a great achievement, although if memory serves me correctly, they pissed Intel off on more than one occasion. Their mistake was, IMO, to stop there not garner support from others.
It seems to me that Rambus concluded that because Intel is backing them off, they can be as unsympathetic to everyone else as they want. You hit the nail dead on when you ask Without Intel's support, why would anyone have made RDRAM at all. It seems to me that a great product, that is one which meets both the producers' and the consumers' needs from both economic and technological POV, does not need a heavy handed support from Intel. Why is it for example that Sun Micro did not choose to standardize on RDRAM? What about all the other other non-PC products out there? RDRAM is not in a better market position not because Intel was slow to build a CPU for it, but because the memory makers did not want to build it unless they absolutely had to.
Of course Intel's support is highly desireable. But if that is the only thing that the company has going for it, the management is flawed.
JMO,
ST
PS In nature, the Silverback Gorilla that leads the clan is not the biggest and most powerful gorilla, but the one who has gained the support of most other gorillas. Even in the jungle one needs the support of others more than his own might. |
