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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.'"

15 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 Graelin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      That may sound good and all, but the engineers have very little to do with the future. That is not their job. The CEO is a very good choice since it is their direction that R&D follows and eventually, the engineers build.

      Better still, would be the CEOs of the real drivers in the industry. Intel, AMD, IBM - where the innovation really takes place. The motherboard companies more or less follow suit to whatever these guys do.

    2. 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. Geek fight!!!! by BabyDave · · Score: 4, Funny
    'What do you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market?

    A geek Royal Rumble?

    1. Re:Geek fight!!!! by hkmwbz · · Score: 4, Funny
      "CEO == Business major attractive enough for TV interviews."

      No rule without exceptions. McBride of Caldera, er, SCO, looks like a retarded gimp who has had his face smashed by an angry dwarf:

      http://www.caldera.com/images/execs/dmcbride_reg.j pg

      --
      Clever signature text goes here.
  3. Where's Linux??? by advocate_one · · Score: 5, Insightful

    all those questions and they didn't ask them whether they were going to be more Linux friendly with their motherboards...

    What we really want is proper manufacturers' drivers for all the chipsets on the board, included on the CD that comes with the motherboard.

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
    1. Re:Where's Linux??? by intermodal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What we really want is proper manufacturers' drivers for all the chipsets on the board, included on the CD that comes with the motherboard.

      No it isn't. What I want are drivers in my kernel, that I can compile with the rest of my kernel, and that I don't have to go to every component's manufacturer's site to get. And in case you haven't noticed, Soyo has been making their boards linux-compliant for a long time now. It's OEM companies that need to be more linux-compliant, and less troublesome with their drivers.

      Even reinstalling Windows on a computer which came with a restore partition without using said restore partition to do it is a hassle due to drivers...

      --
      In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
  4. 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
  5. PC or Console? by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's getting to the point that having everything on-board on the MoBo is actually a good idea. They are cheap, and despensible. If something goes wrong, you simply swap out the board and you end up getting an upgrade to the rest of the components in the processes. At this point, with all-in-one boards becomming more and more speciallized like the nForce from nVidia, it's starting to look like the PC is becomming more console like in nature. As for the gaming consoles of today, we can just look at the PS2. It's platform can function as a PC basically with the added network interface and USB ports. And the GameCube is basically a mini Apple. It has an IBM CPU with ATI graphics. If it had any more memory, it could prolly run OSX. Basically, each generation the line between what defines PC and Console blur more and more.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  6. The question they didn't ask by Zog+The+Undeniable · · Score: 4, Funny

    Will you continue to save 2 cents per board by using cheap electrolytic capacitors that leak after 12 months' use?

    --
    When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
  7. No way! by Gleng · · Score: 5, Funny

    I basically copy and paste the article summary from the front page as a weak attempt at humour (I have flu so it's also my best shot) and someone mods it as interesting.

    It seems people don't even read the front page anymore!

    --
    "Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
  8. Attack of the clones by XNormal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I find it interesting that CEO#5 on question 1 refers to "clone market". This term used to be popular when the "real" PC was IBM and the cheap Taiwanese compatibles were "clones" but it's been a long time since I last heard anyone refer to a generic PC as a "clone".

    --
    Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
  9. What do you get... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "What do you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market? "

    A cartel?

    Bet you any money they still won't be able to produce laptop-sized motherboards for sale to the general public - presumably to ensure that you can't get a decent laptop for less than £1300.

  10. 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.

  11. OK Fine... It was modded up, good for you, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEARN TO USE PARAGRAPHS



    blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah