What Went Wrong for AMD's AM2?

An anonymous reader writes "When AM2 was first announced it seemed like it was going to be a guaranteed hit. After all, this platform would be moving the tremendously successful socket 939 into the future with its use of DDR2 memory, a greatly increased memory bandwidth, hardware virtualization, and a number of exciting new CPUs. Despite everything AM2 had going for it, this includes a dedicated enthusiast base and a tremendous amount of pro-AMD spirit at the time, the new platform has largely been dismissed by consumers. The question now is, what happened? How did AMD go from record growth and being the darling of enthusiasts to having a new platform which failed to impress?"

Comments

Re:Asked, answered.

[VENONA]

The only exception I'd take lies with Google. IMHO, they're just another corporation (with the *responsibility* to go for your wallet), not some magical Do No Evil exception to the rule.

1) Their track record regarding China isn't anything to brag about.
2) They've been very slow to begin providing services (Google Earth comes immediately to mind) which were accessible to Linux/BSD users, which negates some of their Summer of Code efforts, in my mind.
3) The benefits I can derive from them 'wanting to know all about me' are outweighed by the loss of my privacy. I reject Google cookies--I certainly don't feel as if I can trust them with my email.
4) For the kinds of searches I most commonly do, they're simply not as good as they once were. To me, this at least implies some sort of issue with their search technology R&D efforts. It's probably not a problem, from a board/investor POV, as it's clearly good enough to hold market share and support their bottom line, as an advertising company.

I'm not saying that for-profit corporations are intrinsically evil. Concentrations of capital have made a lot of good things possible, and that probably dates back to the invention of money. There are a few for-profits that I'm fairly supportive of, at the moment. But that can change in an instant, as a response to an entirely reasonable (from their POV, and their investors) decision that they take, which leads them to do something that's counter to my best interests.

Non-profits tend to be more aligned with public interest. Even here, there's still no guaranty. Boards can still make mistakes, etc. But in general I tend to be more supportive of them.

But *loyalty* I reserve for *people*. Not products, not corporations of any stripe (and certainly not Google), but people. Ah, well. Time to chase my disloyal self to work...