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The Last Days at 3dfx
sand writes "FiringSquad has a detailed account of what happened in the final days at 3dfx. Every 3dfx product that was released or upcoming is discussed by a former 3dfx employee with inside knowledge on what caused the product delays (including an employee who forgot to fly to Asia to pickup the first Voodoo5 chips). He also discusses money mismanagement and the STB merger. It's a very enlightening article for anyone who's interested in 3D graphics and what goes on inside these companies."
This is what competition is all about. When a company cannot deliver the best product to the best price they don't get any income. If you don't have and income and spend alot without being able to overtake your competators, you will enventually run out of money. It is not fun, but reality in a market economy.
Eventually we will see this when it comes to ATI and nVidia, or they will find a niche market to survive in. The big profit will go to the one making the best product at the best price.
Note - I do not critisize market economy, without it we would probably not have hardware accelerated 3D for home computers at all!
They should have added useful features and clever thinking that circumvented the problems that plagued the other companies. AGP Texture bandwidth could have been solved by texture compression, but S3 ended up doing that. 32 bit colour was implemented by everyone except 3DFX. They could have saved a lot fo bandwidth if they'd have come up with better Z buffer algorithms, but PowerVR did that. They could have added programmable graphics, but that was left to ATI. They could have put T&L on the card, but that was left to Nvidia.
3DFX failed because they didn't innovate
At the start of the consumer 3d graphics business Voodoo were clearly superior, I still have a Voodoo 1 laying around somewhere, there were problems; the whole passthrough cable thing, the lack of windowed support & 16bit clour were all problematic. As an upgrade Voodoo offered the second revision that could run in SLI mode. It required two PCI slots in addition to your 2d graphics card and was horrendously expensive.
nVidia released the TNT that offered similar performance, in one card (not 3!), did 32 bit colour and was significantly cheaper.
3DFX was never competitive from then on, offering weaker, more expensive products that relied on brand name support.
The widespread adoption of D3D / OpenGL around this time over the proprietary Glide API was the nail in the coffin.
Up until the TNT (TNT2), 3dfx was still king of the hill... It would be like buying a Maxtor drive back in Western Digital's heyday.
:)
You *know* what works, so why buy anything else? On the other hand, that's why I like hardware review sites like anantech and Tom's. You may not want to trust them completely, but they do give you a free peek at hardware capabilities.
I like many others was not concerned with them going. Thier attempt to lock the market in via the proprietray GLIDE API was a blatant move to control the market.
:-)
I'm happy to see the tail end of any company that does this.
Thier lawsuit against the guy doing the GLIDE wrapper didn't help improve my opinion of them.
The notion that the death of a business is no big thing ignores the human element and several economic facts.
...
First of all, the death of a business creates all kinds of collateral damage, from employees who lose their jobs to creditors and shareholders who never get paid. When the going is good, wealth is created, which creates benefits not only for the company, its shareholders and its employees, but also for its vendors, the municipality it resides in, and surrounding businesses where employees shop (this is known as the "multiplier effect," if you've studied economics). Many, many people and entities gain from a healthy business.
Second, the idea that a business should "quit while the going is good" is ridiculous on its face. Businesses are started to create wealth. They are best at creating wealth "when the going is good." It makes no sense to start a business at all if you're planning to close up shop when you start to be successful. "We just made our first profit! Time to liquidate!" Sure
Businesses certainly can quite easily become irrelevant, but when that happens, there are real costs associated with that, to many consituencies. A business dying is quite far from a neutral event.
They day 3DFX bought STB was the beginning of the end. The sheer arrogance of believing they could cut off all their customers and just have the whole business to themselves. That they could compete with both chip *and* board manufacturers, and still come out on top. Sure, they had a head start, but Creative, Diamond, etc, would inevitably throw their considerable support behind another chip company.
The management overplayed their hand, big style, they were bound to lose. They were just way too cocky. Of course you can see that just from the lunch budget.
Most secret technology is often sent through methods that can be intercepted by halfway decent corporate spies.
I think one thing that really started to kill 3dfx was the fact until Voodoo5, 3dfx acceleration required you buy a separate board in addition to the main graphics card, something many users and OEM's intensely dislike.
When both nVidia and ATI started offering better 3-D graphics cards that didn't need a second card for good 3-D performance, that seriously hurt 3dfx very quickly. It also didn't help that 3dfx's offerings when the Voodoo5 did finally get released didn't compare well with the nVidia and ATI competition, either.
What finally killed 3dfx was the release of nVidia's GeForce 256 chipset, which offered a quantum leap forward in 3-D acceleration. ATI's rapid development of the Radeon R100 and R200 chipsets didn't help things for 3dfx, either.
Yep, it's all very simple:
;)
If a company fails because it tries to do the wrong things, the management is at fault because they are supposed to tell the rest of the company what to do. If the rest of the company fails to do the things the management asks of them, the managers are at fault because they hired these guys.
In short, always blame the boss when something goes wrong.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi