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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chip Anderson who wrote (13258)	6/14/1999 4:03:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 16960

Sorry for the confusion. Let's hope this clears things up. IMO, 3dfx should provide easy licensing to Glide and encourage other card makers to support it, rather than fighting against it. Here is the why: Glide is still valuable to 3dfx because it lets 3dfx implement hardware innovations without waiting for Microsoft. It is marginally valuable to other card makers because they can claim some backwards compatibility. BUT, Glide is losing its value as a potential API to other card makers, because (a) there are not that many new "Glide" games out there, and (b) the performance gap between Glide and D3D is closing. The win-win case is if everyone supports Glide, but 3dfx still maintains control of it (much like the JAVA situation where others can contribute, but Sun Micro makes the last call). Unless Glide's footprint increases, there is a big chance that it will fade away in about a year or so and that will be bad for 3dfx. It is in 3dfx's best interest to assure Glide's survival, and the best way to do it is to entice other card makers to support it. To worry about "losing" Glide or giving "a valuable product" away for free is senseless. Value is in the eye of the beholder and not based on how much development money was spent or what the product can do. I've tried to point out that if a company manages to convince others to tie their fortunes to its products, the company increases its chances of success immensely. This is what all smart companies do; they create secondary markets based on their products. For example, rather than insisting to make money by selling every Photoshop filter, Adobe made the interface freely available so that other companies now make Photoshop filters and make money off Adobe's product. One of the reasons to buy Photoshop vs say Photopaint is the assurance that the wealth of filters available (eg. KPT PowerTools) will work fine on your system. BTW, this is why previously I said that 3dfx's next product should be open and extendable so that others can build products on top of it. IF 3dfx works hard on convincing others to use Glide, then may be in a few years Glide will be popular enough to be considered a worthy platform. At which point in time 3dfx may be able to leverage it from the PC into other products. Otherwise, 3dfx should be just happy that they ensured Glide's survival and have been free of Microsoft's influence. ST P.S. Thanks for the info on "Pirates of Silicon Valley".