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CEOs Of The Motherboard Market Talk Shop

Posted by timothy on from the fatherboard-makers-abscond dept.

k-hell writes "An interesting piece from AnandTech: 'What do you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market? An excellent avenue to understand where this industry is headed. Find out what the heads of the motherboard industry think about everything from AMD's Opteron to the future of the worldwide economy in our first quarterly CEO Forum.'"

5 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. What would be really interesting by seizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    CEOs are not the visionaries, generally - what would be far more interesting would be to gather some of the leading engineers from these companies, and ask them how they thought the market would progress over the next few years.

    1. Re:What would be really interesting by jkrise · · Score: 4, Interesting

      gather some of the leading engineers from these companies, and ask them how they thought the market would progress over the next few years.

      A totally redundant exercise. Engineers normally have a choice - their pet project, or pay-check - they normally choose the latter.

      The way to find out about market directions is to ask the big bosses. BillyBoy would be a nice choice to ask, but he wouldn't speak his mind. You can't ask RMS or Linus - one is a philosopher and the other is just an Engineer - so you go back to Step 1 !

      You can't ask AnandTech or THG - they're paid to report numbers, not analyse and predict. You can't ask Gartner or Aberdeen - they've been bought over severally. That leaves just 2 people - you can ask Slashdot, or just yourself.

      If you asked Slashdot, the noise would drown the signal by a factor of 1000000. The best person to ask this question would be - yourself!!

      I did it (I mean myself) and this is what I came up with. There's a lot of consolidation going on now in the commodity desktop market. There's more than 1 CPU mfr, more than 1 RAM mfr, more than 1 hard disk mfr. , BIOS, video card etc. Controlling all these guys isn't an easy task.

      Both Intel and MS seem to be gunning for a sizable section of the mobo pie. Intel plays it with chipsets, MS plays it with Palladium. Neither is likely to succeed, IMO. The mobo and the tech market stays a commodity market. Windows CANNOT be a commodity OS, hence Linux is the only candidate for the people's OS. Next question please...

      -

      --
      If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
  2. Motherboard as a commodity... by MosesJones · · Score: 4, Interesting


    The problem with assuming that the motherboard CEOs are going to be driving the market is that it misses the fact that there are so many. This happens in commodity markets which become well understood and have a relatively low R&D expense. Higher levels of R&D (for instance graphics cards) mean less competition and higher turnover of companies. The motherboard people provide a required commodity in a computer that is a bit more complex that the power supply, but it is not what will drive the industry forwards.

    These are followers, not leaders, of the industry. Just because they plug-in other peoples processors to specs created by those other people does not mean that they innovate the market. Its an interesting read from people who can see their part of the market, but it doesn't give a roadmap for the longer term.

    Now what I'd like to see would be a closed room discussion with CCTV cameras between, Jobs, Ellison, Gates and McNeally.... with knives. THAT would tell you which way the market was going :-)

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
  3. Re:Geek fight!!!! by Duncan3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    CEO != geek. CTO == geek.

    CEO == Business major attractive enough for TV interviews.

    --
    - Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
  4. questionable value by ReallyQuietGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (a) all of these vendors are ultimately competitors. surely the things they will publicly agree on as "good/bad/whatever" will be agreed on because it is the lowest common denominator, blindingly obvious, or otherwise something that does not give away internal development hints nor affect the bottom line (b) all of these vendors are ultimately in thrall to the one big kahuna of the motherboard industry, Intel. By this I don't mean in terms of motherboards shipped (even though Intel does ship a whole lot) - I mean in terms of the CPUs used and the chipsets supplied. Which one of these CEOs is going to give the skinny on strong-arm-elbow-twisting, e.g. anti-VIA action, etc.? The CEO that is shorting his own stock, that's who. So they DO talk some about Intel (Nvidia's interactions etc.) - what's it really worth? Are they REALLy telling you the inside news? (c) historically industry predictions have always been fucked up. One big reason why Moore's "law" is repeatedly cited is because it's one of the few predictions that came out more-or-less true: where are our flying cars, robot helpers, etc? nowhere, that's where. "motherboards will get smaller". Excellent prediction, Sherlock. Let me predict another: the model numbers will increment. This kind of "news" is the kind of pap that rubbish news/journos push out, like how all those articles trumpeting the impact of the dotcoms right up until the bubble burst.