Alex, I have to agree with Tony on this - management is screwing up w.r.t. Wall Street. Right now TDFX has no respect on the Street - its just another chip company that's lost up to 50% of its values. Wall Street's reaction to that is "Yikes! Stay Away!"
The Banshee launch was a golden opportunity to reverse that perception. You ask "What else do you want?" I wanted lots of information on Banshee to come out after CGDC (after the other graphic chips had been announced). What did we get? Nothing. No ammo for the FUD wars that competitors waged. Lots of spooked investors. Lots of public confusion by potential consumers.
Optimistically I said, "OK, they must be hiding something positive - either a killer feature or a bunch of surprise partnering announcements. Great."
I wanted a splashy Banshee announcement at E3 - that was a _huge_ opportunity to get lots of free press and show off Banshee's strengths - stuff that would get Wall Street (and any wavering OEM customers) to take notice. That opportunity was wasted. In fact, there appears to be a bit of a press backlash because of all the NDA secrecy that TDFX insisted on during their closed door viewings of Banshee. The reporters were, correctly, frustrated that TDFX was behaving differently for most other high-tech companies they cover.
So now, finally, we get the Banshee announcement - no fanfare, no surprise features, no big partnerships (so far). Again, this was a primo time to generate lots of coordinated news that would cause Wall Street to sit up and take notice and it was wasted. The fact that that didn't occur is a negative in many people's mind.
Other management teams at companies like Microsoft, Intel, Sun, IBM, and many, many other companies would have taken advantage of these major PR opportunities.
Big visible product launches give customers a good feeling about the product. They help the stock - OEMs prefer to partner with companies that have a strong stock price. They help shareholders - management teams that ignore their shareholders totally do so at their own risk.
I am now at a loss to explain why TDFX was so secretive with Banshee between CGDC and now. The cost of that secrecy so far has been high (to shareholders, to employees, to TDFX's public credibility, and to the financial strength of the company). The resulting advantages of that secrecy are not apparent to me.
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