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AMD Layoffs Maul Marketing, PR Departments
MojoKid writes "AMD's initial layoff announcement yesterday implied that the dismissals would occur across the company's global sales force. While that may still be true, it has become clear that AMD has slashed its PR and Marketing departments in particular. The New Product Review Program* (NPRP) has lost most of its staff and a Graphics Product Manager, who played an integral role in rescuing AMD's GPU division after the disaster of R600, also got the axe. Key members of the FirePro product team are also gone. None of the staff had any idea that the cuts were coming, or that they'd focus so particularly in certain areas. These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press."
I'm missing the context here; could somebody explain what this disaster was and how it threatened the existence of the GPU division? A quick google returns nothing.
AMD's weakness is not in getting brand recognition, every major PC carrier knows who they are. They need a competitive product. That requires engineering investments and hard work to catch up to soon to be Ivy Bridge. Servers don't want a power inefficient processor, and power users want top class for the price, and AMD is delivering neither right now on the CPU front. They also shouldn't try entering any other markets, I imagine that is what they are thinking though, try to get out of the x86 business since they are falling behind. Hopefully the Radeon 7000 series does really well, this next GPU generation is shaping up to be a huge force in the massively parallel server market, and AMD better realize the opportunity they have right now to earn back some cred with a rock solid GPU lineup. It doesn't help that Nvidia, AMD, and every ARM manufacturer are all basically waiting on TSMC for bulk 28nm transistors. They are all starting to feel the heat for depending on one company for all their silicon for this next gen of graphics hardware.
These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press."
Better to cut marketing and the "vital" line of communication to the press, than to cut product development and not have a new product next quarter... because then having lines of communication to the press won't seem so vitally important anymore.
Still it sucks for anyone to lose their jobs.
Seriously, with 14 bazillion bloggers fighting to get clicks to their webpages, all you need is one guy with a copy of the datasheet and a twitter account, and you'll have your part's nomenclature showing up on every RSS feed in the world within minutes if not days. And, if you're lucky (or just know where to put the typos), you can get /. to send your favorite blogger enough clicks to buy an iPhone.
Office Space?
These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press.
Bob Slydell: What would you say ya do here?
Tom Smykowski: Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
The Admin and the Engineer
Here it is, 2011, when CEO's live and die by 10K's and stock prices, we have a company that layed off marketing and PR and kept their engineers. How much AMD stock can I buy? Sign me up!
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
The reason it was a disaster was the nVidia GeForce 8800. ATi was pretty sure that nVidia was still going to be back on teh old style of cards, with separate shaders, for their first DirectX 10 part. That is allowed, though not ideal (the programming interface has to be unified, not the hardware). ATi already had experience with unified shaders from the 360.
So from all accounts their not-so-great GPU that was up and coming was going to be fine against nVidia. Then out of the blue nVidia drops the 8800, they did a real good job keeping a lid on it. Fully unified architecture that was fast as hell. We are talkign twice as fast as previous generation stuff often and that was on DirectX 9 stuff, never mind what it'd be able to do with the newer APIs.
So ATi had to delay their release a bit and try to get something to compete better. When the R600 did launch as the Radeon 2000 series, it wasn't good competition.
However ATi recovered very well with the Radeon 4000 and 5000 series. The 4000 series were extremely competitive cards. Good prices, good performance, low power usage, etc. Then the 5000 series were the first DX11 cards on the market by a number of months, and also great performers.
Honestly they haven't been performing and it's understandable they got the axe. Maybe now AMD can focus on product rather than image.
In my experience image sells more often than brand. Particularly image establishes brand, for what it's worth.
These look like the sort of cuts of a company which may be in particular stress. Not encouraging.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ultimately, they need both, but right now they need engineering far more than they need marketing. Intel has a significant advantage in that they sell far more chips and can afford to spend more money on bribes and development
In my experience image sells more often than brand. Particularly image establishes brand, for what it's worth.
Yes, but the people doing that for AMD haven't exactly been doing a stellar job over the years... Their marketing messages have been constantly changing, and each version was a muddled mess.
Not saying they deserved to be sacked or anything... Just, marketing is not one of AMDs strengths and I don't think this will cost them as much as one might think.
These look like the sort of cuts of a company which may be in particular stress. Not encouraging.
I'm encouraged that they cut heavy on marketing and less on R&D, as opposed to the opposite. That'd imply they aren't planning on being competitive, ever, and just want to suck as much money out of existing products as possible before the end. Reducing the marketing but keeping as much R&D as possible implies they want to be around for the long haul.
Of course you do need both R&D and marketing, but if you gotta cut (and with their current revenue and cost structure, I can't say they don't) then this seems like the smarter way to me.
I'm even more encouraged that the riffs supposedly hit the executives disproportionately as well. AMD has a kinda top-heavy structure and I'm sure that there's some chaff that can be cleared out, and with better buck-for-bang.
The enemies of Democracy are
/me thinks they will contract marketing out. Cutting marketing and outsourcing is the lesser of the two evils.
Actually, a lot of companies are hitting R&D the heaviest, since they require lots of space, supplies, and equipment (overhead) and are often the highest-paid non-management/attorney positions. Usually a terrible, terrible plan for any company as a whole, since THAT'S HOW A COMPANY STAYS COMPETITIVE, but it keeps the stock healthy for a long-enough period that management can cash out and then get the fuck out of Dodge before the house of cards comes tumbling down. For a thrill, keep an eye on the big pharma companies over the next two to three years, it's not gonna be pretty.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Actually if you have been keeping up with events of late AMD has been selling so many chips that the only thing holding them back has been trouble from the manufacturing getting up to speed on the latest die shrink so I really doubt marketing when you are selling out of chips already is REALLY needed that much, do you?
I mean look at the AMD Brazos line, they have those things in everything from netbooks (here is the one I personally sold my MSI Wind for after picking up a few for customers, it hold 8Gb of RAM and is sweeeet, both on performance and battery life) to laptops like this one with B-Ray to cool HTPC designs to these really awesome all in ones which I found make pretty killer SOHO/small business and family PCs.
So actually I'd say AMD was on the right track when their CEO announced that they were slowing their desktop output to ramp up mobile chips to try to fill the demand. Frankly even if they hadn't had the problems with the supply chain I doubt seriously they'd be needing much in the way of advertising ATM. Right now with the economy down prices trumps just about everything and the bang per buck was in the AMD camp even before the APUs hit, now you have machines that'll play WoW and smooth HD video at frankly insanely cheap prices and get 6 hours on the battery for the mobiles and not heat up the house on the HTPC and all in one. Seems like a good combo to me.
Of course this isn't even bringing up the next "big thing" from the AMD camp which most of the number crunchers and programmers here ought to be drooling over and that is the switch from VLIW to vector in their APUs and GPUs which should bring floating point math a hell of a speed boost. Oh and for all you FOSS lovers out there AMD is switching to Coreboot so you'll have a system that can be open and modified from the BIOS layer on up.
I do have a question about TFA though....what was wrong with R600? Sure the 2xxx and 3xxx series didn't slaughter Nvidia but they also didn't crank the living hell out of the heat nor did they have the whole "bumpgate" issue Nvidia had at the time. Their IGP version of the 3xxx was also quite nice for HD video and the HD38xx was pretty sweet and was easy to crossfire. So while I wouldn't call it a second coming or Nvidia killer it certainly wasn't up to the level of the Nvidia 5xxx, aka the Hoover card fiasco.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Personally, I hate marketing. I hated commercials when I watched television, I hate adverts in my newspaper, I hate them on the tubez. Today, with this wonderful internet we have, when I want something, I start searching.
My youngest kid decided that a bike would be cool. He thought about a Harley. I told him that A; Harley is overpriced by an order of magnitude, and B; V-twins suck ass. He did some research, he half believed me, but still, the offer of a trade was just to good to pass up.
Now, three months later, he's believing me, and he's researching AND verifying his research with test rides on other bikes.
He came home last week, exclaiming about how much POWER just a little bitty Kawasaki 250 has, and how FAST it is, and how SMOOOTH it rides. He went on and on, and on some more.
Marketing? Screw marketing. Unless I get to ride the girl in the commercials, marketing means shit to me - and the son is learning the same thing. Just give us the internet, so we can compare specs, features, and prices. The corporations would do better to save all that money they are wasting on bubble headed blonde wannabe actresses who sprawl half naked across their products.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br