Sun, I must disagree here:
...I don't buy the arguement that "I don't want one of my products to steal sales from
the other one". One way or another you are going to face competition and advance
technology. You might as well get that competition from yourself rather than another
company."........
I assume that we are referring to Banshee vs. V2 and SLI (if Banshee did it, it would steal sales of V2). Yes it would steal sales. And it would be bad. Our product mix would shift to lower priced lower margin products. BAD. Look at our market. If you were even thinking of doing Banshee SLI, you have been, or will be doing V2 SLI.
...."Yet only one OEM has agreed to use Banshee
and two others are just debating if they should buy into it. I consider this a serious
marketing flop. If they had done their job right, some OEMs and card makers
would simply trust that whatever comes from 3Dfx is worth carrying and would
have announced support for Banshee way before it was even a prototype. Not to
mention that time to production sucked; If they'd come up with Banshee 4~6 weeks
sooner they'd catch the back-to-school market. Since they missed on that
opportunity, they may as well have taken another few weeks and improved on it for
the Christmas season."....
First of all you are making this judgement, I believe, based on the STBI CC. STBI, though a biggee, is only one of several OEM card suppliers. Elsa, Diamond, Creaf and others may be having more success. BTW, the other two major OEMs that STBI was talking about may well be leaning towards Banshee today, since nVidia has lowered the specs on TNT. Now if we get 3 big STBI OEMs, we could be talking about GTW, DELL, CPQ here. not bad...if true...
As for trusting whatever TDFX spits out...you have to be kidding, right? They are unproven in the OEM market. I don't think Dell wants to find out that TDFX wasn't all its cracked up to be after they start getting the calls 2 months and a million computers later. You were kidding, right?
Time to production sucked? It has taken nVidia a year to come out with a new chip. In that time TDFX has come up with V2 and Banshee, and made the worlds best (hopefully) 2D core from scratch. Have you seen TNT boards yet? Savage? PVRSG? ATI Rage 128? It isn't like they are the last ones to the party. And your suggestion that they wait until christmas- and totally miss the refresh- is just plain...silly. I can see it now, "Sure Banshee is great, but hey it came out at the same time as its competitors. Damn! Lets wait a while and let the other products entrench themselves and maybe we can do better next year!"
If they coulda come up with it 4-6 weeks earlier? Yeah, how about this: what if they could have come up with it 2 years ago! That would have been great! I don't think they are dragging their feet on this one, I just think that they want the product to be good. This is their first impression on OEMs and it MUST be solid.
Sorry if I sounded a little wise-ass here, but I really wouldn't expect such comments from such a bright guy. 4 in a row! Yikes! |
