What happened is that they brought in the guy from Pepsi as their CEO. You know, a product that is basically a commodity, and only differentiates itself from its competitors through advertising and marketing.
He stopped R&D and tanked the product.
Didn't something similar happen to Apple when ex-Pepsi CEO John Sculley took over? What does selling fizzy sugar water have to do with selling computers anyway?
I had owned a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold, their best card ever. Super clean recording and playback, solid drivers that "just worked". In 1998 I decided to get a SB Live! I was one of the lucky ones that owned a Intel 440BX chipset motherboard so I never had crackling problems with the card. I even bought a nice set of Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500 speakers and hooked it up to the DIN-9 port on the card for nice clean digital audio.
My first issue with the Live! appeared when Windows 2000 was released. Creative didn't have any drivers for the card, 2000 supported basic sound output out of the box though. So I landed up having to hack the NT4 drivers to work. Took about an hour and several tedious steps but it worked great. They finally released (buggy) drivers around the end of March of 2000, stable drivers finally came out in 2002 and thats what I'm using today with that card. On a side note, I also purchased a PC-DVD Dxr3 kit from Creative.... yeah no stable drivers for that ever too. Good thing the decoder card was a re-branded Sigma Designs Hollywood+ and their drivers worked with the Creative card.
Recently I built a machine with a X-Fi card. I notice the crappy quality of the onboard sound, plus I have a few MIDI devices that I like to use. First strike was that Creative dropped the DIN-9 speaker connection sometime around the release of the Audigy 2. So I now have to hook up the speakers via analog, no big deal as the DAC on the X-Fi is apparently better then the one in the DTT2500's decoder box. Next is the drivers, Creative dropped the Dolby Digital Live and DTS hardware encoding and decoding across the board. Not only do the Vista drivers lack the DDL/DTS functions, the latest XP drivers do too! Seems that Creative didn't want to renew their license at all for this technology, one has to hack it back in if they REALLY want it.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that Creative is doing badly financially. They started to ignore their biggest cash cow (long time soundcard customers) and are (were?) trying to fight the iPod. Guess what, the drivers and software for those suck too, thats why Apple is so successful... it "just works".
Still have the receipt from compgeeks.com for my Genica "MPTrip" MP3 CD Player purchased May of 2000. The first of its kind, it could hold a whopping 650MB of MP3s vs. the dinky 64MB the flash players did.... for only $99! http://web.archive.org/web/20000511030931/http://www.genica.com/MP3-CD.htm
It really was a POS though, every track on regular CDs buffered 3 seconds no matter what, including gapless CDs. It claimed to have read CD-RWs, but they later retracted that. My player did indeed play them until one day they stopped reading and started spinning the CDs BACKWARDS!
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What happened is that they brought in the guy from Pepsi as their CEO. You know, a product that is basically a commodity, and only differentiates itself from its competitors through advertising and marketing.
He stopped R&D and tanked the product.
Didn't something similar happen to Apple when ex-Pepsi CEO John Sculley took over? What does selling fizzy sugar water have to do with selling computers anyway?
Just be lucky they aren't basing the price in Euros.
Anybody remember THAT installer? There was no "back" option on most of the screens. If you screwed up, you had to start over from scratch.
...complete with Program Manager and File Manager. can't have Windows Classic without the complete interface experience. ;)
I had owned a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold, their best card ever. Super clean recording and playback, solid drivers that "just worked". In 1998 I decided to get a SB Live! I was one of the lucky ones that owned a Intel 440BX chipset motherboard so I never had crackling problems with the card. I even bought a nice set of Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500 speakers and hooked it up to the DIN-9 port on the card for nice clean digital audio.
My first issue with the Live! appeared when Windows 2000 was released. Creative didn't have any drivers for the card, 2000 supported basic sound output out of the box though. So I landed up having to hack the NT4 drivers to work. Took about an hour and several tedious steps but it worked great. They finally released (buggy) drivers around the end of March of 2000, stable drivers finally came out in 2002 and thats what I'm using today with that card. On a side note, I also purchased a PC-DVD Dxr3 kit from Creative.... yeah no stable drivers for that ever too. Good thing the decoder card was a re-branded Sigma Designs Hollywood+ and their drivers worked with the Creative card.
Recently I built a machine with a X-Fi card. I notice the crappy quality of the onboard sound, plus I have a few MIDI devices that I like to use. First strike was that Creative dropped the DIN-9 speaker connection sometime around the release of the Audigy 2. So I now have to hook up the speakers via analog, no big deal as the DAC on the X-Fi is apparently better then the one in the DTT2500's decoder box. Next is the drivers, Creative dropped the Dolby Digital Live and DTS hardware encoding and decoding across the board. Not only do the Vista drivers lack the DDL/DTS functions, the latest XP drivers do too! Seems that Creative didn't want to renew their license at all for this technology, one has to hack it back in if they REALLY want it.
Anyway, I'm not surprised that Creative is doing badly financially. They started to ignore their biggest cash cow (long time soundcard customers) and are (were?) trying to fight the iPod. Guess what, the drivers and software for those suck too, thats why Apple is so successful... it "just works".
Still have the receipt from compgeeks.com for my Genica "MPTrip" MP3 CD Player purchased May of 2000. The first of its kind, it could hold a whopping 650MB of MP3s vs. the dinky 64MB the flash players did.... for only $99! http://web.archive.org/web/20000511030931/http://www.genica.com/MP3-CD.htm
It really was a POS though, every track on regular CDs buffered 3 seconds no matter what, including gapless CDs. It claimed to have read CD-RWs, but they later retracted that. My player did indeed play them until one day they stopped reading and started spinning the CDs BACKWARDS!