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

To: Scott Garee who wrote (13687)	7/13/1999 12:07:00 PM
From: Mike O'Brien	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Yeah, I too have often wondered why ATI is such an anomaly. The best explanation I've heard was from Scott Sellers of 3dfx in his recent interview: "Well, ATI's business model is price. Purely and simply. So their recent success has been the fact that they've had no competition really at the low end of the PC market as a result of S3's demise. So their business model isn't any different, it's just that no one has been able to compete with them price-wise because S3 floundered all over the place and was not even able to come out with a piece of competing technology and any given price point. So, that's really why ATI has been so successful. But, what's happening now is ourselves and NVIDIA even in some cases, now we have very cost competitive products that, from a performance and feature set dominate them. And we are not seeing a whole lot of design wins for ATI's new products. So, I think what you're seeing in ATI's success is largely legacy based and the biggest problem for ATI is since since their whole business model is based on price, Intel with the integrated chip sets with things like Whitney, are going to overtake them overnight. It's a real problem for ATI in general of how do you sell price when Intel's going to come in and almost take away that market by definition since you have graphics integrated with Northbridge." In all fairness to ATI, their newest stuff is much stronger technologically, and Scott Sellers is overstating their problems. -Mike