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

To: Tae Spam Kim who wrote (3728)	6/4/1998 3:08:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Re: "Keeping your future roadmap secret is CRITICAL in this business, if 3Dfx published what they're going to do in the next year, it gives competitors the information to make better/comparable products." The argument here is over timing and granularity of information release (i.e., managing expectations). Many very successful companies in the technology sector have very public roadmaps and have no problem showing previews of their technology well in advance of its release. Microsoft, Intel, Sun, Apple come to mind. All have (or in Apple's case "had" ;-) well publicized road maps for their long-term directions that help their customers (and shareholders) make informed decisions on the long-term viability of their products. At the opposite extreme, the old IBM was an example of a company that went way overboard on secrecy and ultimately suffered from it. Now let me flame myself: "Chip, what the heck do you want these guys to do?" I want TDFX to state publicly, at a high level, their intentions on things like high-levels of multitexturing, higher color-depth, higher resolutions, important bus architectures and geometry acceleration. Everyone knows these are important future directions for the industry yet TDFX can't even utter the phrases publically. This is _not_ a request for legally-binding specs nor a request for bogus framerate predictions/benchmarks mind you. It is a request that TDFX behave like the rest of the industry and provide more insight into its future technical directions. In the shorter (2-4 month) timeframe, TDFX's secrecy on Banshee is extreme. There is _nobody_ out there that could competitively respond to Banshee's specs at this point. And yet we still don't know simple things like the resolutions and color depths that this chipset supports. Matrox, S3, PVRSG, and nVIDIA have all gone public with their specs. I can understand keeping mum about framerates and benchmarks, but what's the value of keeping basic info like res. and color depth secret anymore? I remain long on TDFX because, ultimately, the technical people inside the company will come through for us. Based on what I've seen recently, I'm convinced the management and marketing people are making things harder than they need to be. Chip