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

To: Jeff Lins who wrote (11037)	3/10/1999 12:51:00 AM
From: Obewon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Jeff, If you didn't consider S3 a threat until recently with its announcements about the upcoming Savage4 chip, I must question what would meet the threshold of a "threat" in your book. Sure they flirted with bankruptcy but they weren't even close to going out of business. Even with no truely competitive chip for the past year and a half, S3 was/is STILL one of the market leaders with 21% market share of the graphic chip industry in 1998. It sits as an entrenched and established competitor in the very markets that 3Dfx has been trying to break into for a year. It has a technology pact with Intel to get the earliest looks at upcoming technologies incorporated into Intel's CPU. It currently has seized Intel's former position of industry spoiler by essentially selling its chips at cost to try and rebuild market share and manufacturing volume. Due to this, profits for everyone making chips only will be extremely hard to come by unless a consensus is reached that one of the next generation of chips is truely superior to all the others. As for holding off technology and seeing it depreciate in our warehouses, I would rather the part be rock-steady and ready than rushing it to market with poor drivers or lacking full OpenGL support. Additionally, I would like to ensure that we don't have board shortages as was seen in 3Q98 with the Voodoo Banshee. We are STILL going to beat our competitors by a large margin getting the technology out. OEM's want assurances that we can support their needs as well and running out of boards isn't the best way of shoring up confidence. I have heard no indication that the drivers are even close to ready yet eventhough the results from current beta drivers lead us to hope that they aren't far away. Given that the release wouldn't be until the last week in March anyway, WHY NOT hold back a couple of days (if cash flow is sufficient) so we can get better bang for the buck in 2Q99. Obewon