Mid-year corrections, forecasts, and procrastinations

Jon’s boat gets ready for a little cruise on the Bay

Never
turn your back on a competitor. If AMD has made just one mistake it was in not
reading Andy Grove’s book Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the
Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. We
hear some cruel person has sent a box of them to the top management at AMD.

Never let a competitor get the upper hand. When Intel
heard AMD was rumored to be buying ATI, Intel should have dispatched one of its
corporate jets, and the president of Intel should have put his check book in
front of Dave Orton and said, “Fill in the number.” Hmm, maybe the Intel guys
should read Andy’s book.

There’s technology and there’s marketing, and Nvidia
does well in both. While we’ve all been flappin’ our lips about the pros and
cons of GPC-GPUs, Nvidia productized the concept, came out with four turnkey
solutions and the accompanying software, and turned it into a genuine category.

The best design doesn’t always turn into the
best product. What looked great on paper and a data sheet turned out to be a
so-so product, good value but not the pizzazz we all expected—the R600 coulda
been a contender. (And the Airbus A380 coulda been great airplane.)

Even the biggest marketing campaign can’t make a
product great. While the world waited for three long years for Vista to come
out, Microsoft had to dilute the engineering teams to defend the fortress
against viruses and worms so that when it did finally show up, it was
underwhelming and still early code.

Keep
your customers happy if you want to keep your customers. Who says companies
don’t change? Microsoft gets a gold star for putting its money where its mouth
is and standing behind the Xbox 360 and its overheating problems. Instead of
pretending it didn’t exist, or hoping that the next rev would make it go away,
or waiting for a class-action suit, the company took the initiative and
protected its customers—now where do you think they’ll go when it comes time
to buy a new game console?

Don’t play by the rules. When Nintendo’s underpowered,
tiny game console came out only its fan boys who cheer anytime they hear the
name Zelda or Mario were excited; the rest of the world declared it too little
to compete. This year we’ve seen the controller revolutionalize the game
industry attracting new gamers and keeping the loyalists happy. Now Nintendo is
the darling of the industry and the other suppliers are trying to copy it.