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About LinkBacksDave Orton resigns as the pressure builds up at ATI. Uncle Hector indulging in some belated spring cleaning?
Discover more in this HEXUS.headline.
Dave Orton resigns as the pressure builds up at ATI. Uncle Hector indulging in some belated spring cleaning?
Discover more in this HEXUS.headline.
maybe good news in the long run, but bad news in that it is kind of the icing on the cake for Intel and Nvidia in particular. It basically demonstates that despite the brave face, ATi has been very, very bad recently.
The ATi chipsets are average (or at least the boards using them have been), the recent graphics releases by the company have been underwhelming at best. How many people will buy one or even two HD2900s when they use that much power and are often outclassed by the competition?
It makes me sad and a bit annoyed, because we desperately need AMD/ATi in order to keep prices low and innovation high. I for one will be taking advantage of this when Intel slashes its quad core prices at the end of this month! By the looks of it, AMD's Phenom will also underperform... leaving Intel to clobber them on Price/Performance.
It's remarkable how quickly things can change. Last time I built a PC from scratch for myself (about 18 months ago) ATI and AMD ruled both the graphics and CPU high end, and Intel looked a dead duck CPU-wise (Nvidia not quite so bad). Now the roles are totally reversed and we've got a one-horse race again. Very disappointing, because competition is what pushes this industry forwards (you all remember Nvidia's complacency around 2003?).
It's interesting to now watch his interview with HEXUS.tv, from back when the merger was fresh news!
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I am a recent business school grad and just studied the effects of acquisitions and mergers, especially related to top management. Often times the management from the acquired company is placed in executive positions to placate investors and customers, but the grand plan is ultiamtely to replace them. The fact that this anouncement comes almost exactly 6 months after the actual acquisition lends credence to this theory.
Most often it is difficult to resolve differences in company cultures and policies, from management execs down to the most basic front-line positions. It is not uncommon to see many of the acquired company's employees leave, generally on amicable terms with nice severance packages. The CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and COOs get the most attention, but the VPs and middle management can often feel the squeeze as well. I would guess that this is more preplanned than anything else. The ATI managment was left in place to complete their current projects, but with those projects out the door (and most especially with their rather dismal failure) it is time for AMD's managment team to step up and take the new AMD/ATI on the course to reach their strategic vision. I would be more surprised to see the ATI engineers and CSs leave, since AMD needs their experience and intellectual capital to realize the most value out of this merger.
I wish Orton the best and I'm sure he will do well wherever he ends up. I am more excited to see what AMD can accomplish with their integration strategies outlined in their roadmap now that their management team is hopefully unified and all on the same page. (link to AMD roadmap missing due to my limited post count).
Last edited by timlm; 12-07-2007 at 03:22 PM.
nicely worded timlm...and welcome
Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
...and there's the truth. I wonder if nVidia's drivers would suddenly improve if ATI had a flagship card to compete with the GTX? We can only hope that ATI's next card brings them back into the game - otherwise we'll see ever higher prices and less innovation.
And timlm - good points and probably very true. Welcome!
Crosshair VIII Hero (WIFI), 3900x, 32GB DDR4, Many SSDs, EVGA FTW3 3090, Ethoo 719
agree with timlm - i work in finance and although i am not a mna type - i do have exposure and seen the effects of it in the past. the stats for mergers make some scary reading when you look into it. a good % of mna deals fail and a fair number occur because the acquiring companies management don't have the imagination to work out how to grow their company organically and look for alternatives to keep the US shareholders quarterly demands for EPS (earnings per share) growth satisified. one of the biggest features of any merger is that employees on both sides are distracted by concerns about their job security/new role in the combined entity (esp true in areas that are duplicated). in a traditional industry, this may not be such a huge problem, but 6-12 months of distraction in firms like AMD/ATI can result in a complete turnaround in technology lead as we have seen here...
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