Yahoo News heeft een erg interessant artikeltje gepost over het management en de strategiën bij nVidia en 3dfx. nVidia wordt in dit artikel geprezen voor z'n strakke organisatie, die het in staat stelt om elke 6 maanden een nieuwe generatie 3D chips op de markt te planten. Bij 3dfx loopt 't volgens Yahoo beduidend minder smooth, door herhaaldelijke delays en het ontbreken van een heldere visie. Of je het hier nou mee eens bent of niet, feit is dat nVidia het wat betreft financiële resultaten beduidend beter doet dan 3dfx:
What makes these two neighbors a good case study is that last year at this time, they were on just about equal footing in the market for powerful 3-D chips--the technology responsible for the explosions, car wrecks and machine-gun fire in your kid's PC video games. Shares of both companies were trading at $20, and it was anybody's guess which company would prevail. But 3dfx dropped the ball, enduring major delays in bringing new versions of its Voodoo chips to market, while Nvidia chugged merrily along with TNT and GeForce chips that not only came out on time but garnered rave reviews from the gaming press.As a result, Nvidia is the hottest graphics company going, while 3dfx is struggling to prevent itself from becoming an also-ran. Today, Nvidia's stock is trading at $109.88, while 3dfx is languishing at $6.69. Nvidia is coming off a first quarter in which earnings nearly tripled to $18.3 million (47 cents a share), while 3dfx lost $12.4 million (51 cents) in its first quarter--its sixth straight quarterly loss.
[...] In an industry where product delays are the rule rather than the exception, Nvidia's performance really stands out--thanks largely to founder and Chief Executive Officer Jen-Hsun Huang. A Stanford-trained engineer, he has overseen the company's design process with a keen eye for efficiency and the paranoid realization that if you miss a product cycle or two in the graphics chip business, you could be toast. Look what happened to Cirrus Logic (Nasdaq: CRUS - news) and S3 (Nasdaq: SIII - news), both of which had to bail out of the graphics business after serious product delays.
[...] 3dfx, on the other hand, ``has had no clear-cut sustainable vision or execution,'' says Peddie. As a result, it has squandered much of the cachet that it had created for its Voodoo brand two years ago. It now finds itself playing catch-up on the technology front, and it must convince PC makers that it can be a reliable source for them.
[...] All in all, says Peddie, Nvidia is poised to be the next Intel, and could challenge longtime graphics leader ATI Technologies (Nasdaq: ATYT - news) for the No. 1 spot in the industry. Last year, according to Mercury Research, ATI held 31% of the desktop graphics market, versus 12% for Nvidia and 5% for 3dfx.